Short Story – Two Thirds – and accompanying critical analysis

Story – Two Thirds

She shuffles around the room in her slippers. As her husband wakes, she glances over at him. He’s sprawled out on the bed like a magnificent stretched lion, wearing all of the pillows as his mane. She tells him that it’s cold outside, which doesn’t really surprise him. It’s winter. He’s not really clear in the head as she mentions the frost. Her words take a few minutes to penetrate, slowly worming their way through the silky filter of sleep. He lifts his heavy head. Is this what it’s like to be senile? Will his head be this dull? As he looks out the window, his worries scatter and the moment seizes him. The dawn is still weak and the treetops stir with hungry blackbirds.

The man went about his morning routine. Toast, coffee, toothpaste, razor, clothes. Most importantly, he kissed her ear before he walked out of the door. It was a regular day. As he drove towards work, however, he noticed something peculiar. He let the car roll to a halt. A large rat was lumbering down the middle of the road. He opened the door and stepped out into the icy air. It walked directly up to his feet before stopping. It looked dishevelled and it was very large – obese. Something about it was strangely appealing, though. As he marvelled at his proximity to the rat, it turned its head upward, looked him directly in the eye, and said, “Things aren’t always as they seem.” Then it turned and walked into the tall, frost covered grass of the roadside field.

As he sat at his desk, the computer technician thought about his encounter with the rat. He began to think about what the message had meant. He began to think about the things he didn’t have, couldn’t have and wouldn’t have. He began to think about the future. Maybe he needed more from life. Maybe more would help his relationship. Maybe more would make her happy. Maybe more would make him happy.

He threw himself into his work, staying late and staying later; he seized the knowledge of his craft – becoming a Certified Information Systems Security Professional – and wielded it as a weapon for – and against – the System; he prepared for inspections, creating vast tomes of information and documentation; he embraced policies and procedures, Security Technical Implementation Guides and Time Compliance Network Orders; he attended conferences and workshops; he wrote white papers; he studied encryption algorithms and Structured Query Language vulnerabilities. People called him their Guru and their Specialist. They claimed, lauded and promoted him. The Information Technology Security Manager worked tirelessly to better his life.

He drove home one windy autumn day. The trees were shedding leaves in preparation for their stoic winter silence. As he steered the car down the quiet one track road which led to his house, he saw something standing in the road. He stopped the car and killed the engine. It was the rat. He stepped out of the car and walked towards it. As he neared it, the rat looked up at him and said, “Things aren’t always what they seem.” Then it started to run, ducking into a gap in the thick grass of the field.

The grass in the field shudders at the rat’s passage and he follows. He calls for it to stop, to come back, but it keeps moving, edging to the left as it circles behind the houses. He catches flashing glimpses of it as it moves through the grass. It seems to be decreasing in size and getting quicker. He runs, but his feet keep catching in the long grass. It might as well be a forest of mangroves. The rat stays well ahead and cuts into the man’s back garden. It approaches the house and scampers up the steps before suddenly disappearing completely. The man senses something wrong as he unlocks the door and walks into the house. He calls out for her as he walks through the kitchen. There are little things which have changed, little pieces that are missing. He walks up the stairs and into the bedroom.

“Honey?”

The husband opens the closet and begins to cry. His house is still here but his home is gone. She is gone.

715 words

Analysis

In writing this story, I was inspired by the technique of magic realism which Haruki Murakami uses so often. Through bizarre animals and situations, he represents the broken aspects within his characters. This gave me the idea for the rat within this story, which I see as an embodiment of greed or desire for more. I also relied upon ideas from the techniques and theory of Raymond Carver, Maupassant’s twist in the tale, and the Barthes’ theory of reality effect. It was through these collected ideas that I hoped to write a story which not only utilised the tool of magic realism to convey the transformative power of greed, but also to do it in a way which contained a feel of historicity in juxtaposition with the strange; and a twist in the end which leads the story to a moment of epiphany for both the reader and the main character.

I used free writing to achieve a stream of consciousness narrative mode in the first paragraph, but I initially wrote it in first person. Despite the loss of immediacy, I decided to switch to third person narration. I felt that this would allow me to utilise focalised text as well as shift the emphasis on the different roles of the character by referring to the main character as ‘the man’ or ‘the husband,’ etc. I had observed this method used in Carver’s work and found it very effective. I also introduced different lexical styles, including the language of domestic life and the IT workplace. Using diegetic narration made these shifts in lexis possible without leaving the voice of the central narrator and allowed me to shift tenses at the beginning and end of the story to emphasise stream of consciousness as well as shifts in the action.

While this story doesn’t achieve the same effect of stories written by literary greats, I found that using Barthes’ theory of the reality effect successfully augmented the feeling of being within the story, and that Carver’s rule of including no tricks or gimmicks prevented me from making dire errors within the story. I hope to someday live up to Poe’s unity of impression theory and attempted to do so here, but found it difficult and somewhat inorganic to write incidents to obtain a predetermined effect.

383 words

1098 words in total

References

Barthes, R (1977) Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press.

Barthes, R. (1986) The Rustle of Language. Blackwell, pp.141-8 (first published 1967)
Carver, R. (1983) A Small, Good Thing.

Carver, R. (1974) The Bath.

Lodge, D. (1992) The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin Books.

May, C. (ed.) (1994) The New Short Story Theories. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.

O’Connor, F. (1984) Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (ed.) London: Faber & Faber, pp. 87-106.

Poe, E. (1842) ‘Review of Hawthorne – Twice-Told Tales’, from Graham’s Magazine, pp. 298-300

History – Social Reform: 1750-1950 – Public Health

Social Reform: 1750-1950 – Public Health

From 1750 to 1950, Britain was characterised by sweeping changes which permanently impacted the day to day lives of the people. The social conditions caused by rapid population growth and an increasingly urbanised society shaped a period of vast governmental reform. Perhaps one of the most poignant filters through which these changes can be seen is public health.
During and after the Industrial Revolution, Britain was characterised by a migration of poor rural people from the countryside into the cities. This phenomenon became known as urbanisation, and vastly effected society. These people came to the cities looking for work in the new factories, often leaving what were fairly poor standards of living in the countryside and encountering equally poor or worse conditions in the cities upon arriving, as cities in general were totally unequipped for the rapidly increasing population. Housing was usually near to the polluted air of the factories and often owned by the factory owner. These houses were usually built rapidly, with cheap materials, back to back. Owners often built as many houses as possible within the available area to house the workers, leaving these areas dark, confined and with very poor ventilation (Tonge and Quincey, 1985, pp 12-14). Families would often live in one room or in cellars as space dwindled and the lack of external space meant that human waste, decaying plant and animal matter and refuse littered the streets, often in large piles. During heavy rain, surface water could mix with these materials, flood cellar dwellings and poison public water supplies. The lack of proper drains and sewers facilities increased these problems, as did the unwillingness of owners to pipe in fresh water or connect housing to drainage and sewerage (Reid cited in Tonge and Quincey, 1985, pp 5-7). Families often dealt with financial pressure by taking on lodgers or relatives to assist with rent, compounding the overcrowding. The poor conditions in housing and factories, lack of proper nutrition, lack of adequate washing facilities and the extremely long strenuous hours worked by the labouring poor meant that they were more susceptible to sickness and environmentally spread diseases such as typhus and cholera (Thompson, 1990, pp 369-370).
Towns and cities of this era were divided into several subgroups. There were those who were characterised by familial wealth, there were the labouring rural poor which now found their way into the cities, and there were also semi skilled workers whose positions were becoming challenged by new technological advances which allowed unskilled women and children to be taken on as cheap labour. There was also an emerging middle class, which through industrialisation suddenly had the opportunity to create private wealth. Social mobility was becoming more common, but the rift between the extreme poor and the rest of society meant that most of those who lived in relative comfort did not actually know what the living conditions were like for the poor until light was shed on the subject (May, 1996, p.57).

Industrial era Britain was also characterised by great social inequality. Voting rights were tied to property qualifications which meant that the poor had no say in their working and living conditions. The government was characterised by its laissez faire philosophy, mainly seen as a source of law and order rather than an entity to improve the welfare of its people:

… the State ought to confine itself to what regards the State … namely its magistracy; its revenue; its military force by sea and land … in a word … to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, to the prosperity… (Burke cited in Tonge and Quincey, 1985, p.17).

However, things slowly began to change. The French Revolution in 1789 illustrated to extent to which things could go wrong for the ruling classes if the working classes were unhappy. The first attempt at placating the working classes was passed by the Conservative government lead by Henry Addington. The first Factory Act – also known as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act – imposed limits on working days for children of certain ages, mandated education for younger children and addressed issues such as proper ventilation and sleeping conditions for workers. Addington’s government also awarded funds to Edward Jenner to continue his efforts toward obtaining a viable smallpox vaccine, but the 1802 Factory Act was largely unenforced and ignored, making little headway into improving the health and welfare of the poor (May, 1996, p.76). By the time the Earl of Liverpool lead the Conservatives as Prime Minister in 1812, the working class were beginning to call for their own voices to be heard. The movement for unionisation/combination was gaining strength, leading to political unrest and bloodshed in incidents such as the Peterloo Massacre. Trade Unions were legalised by the Conservative government, but fell far short of the demands of the people. As the population continued to increase and the conditions in the cities for the poor became worse, the Reform Act of 1832 took centre stage in the political arena, winning the leadership of the government for the Liberal, Earl Grey. While not directly impacting upon the conditions for workers, the act lowered the requirements for voters, extending the right to vote to 7 percent of the adult population and illustrating the power of the public voice (BBC – History – British History in depth: Prime Ministers and Politics Timeline, no date).

It was at around this time that the serious problems of poor sanitation in the cities were brought to public attention. In 1831, cholera came to Britain. Starting in Sunderland and working its way across the country, it had killed over 21 thousand people by the end of 1832 (Tonge and Quincey, 1985, p.37). The medical establishment at the time was unregulated and largely based on limited training from apprenticeship. They mistakenly thought that germs were the result of disease rather than the cause of it and treatments often did more harm than good, resulting in a public fear of the profession. At the time of the first cholera outbreak there were two main schools of thought as to how the disease spread. The first were the miasmatists, who thought that disease spread by poisonous air and bad smells. The second group were the contagionists, who believed that it spread through contact (Tonge and Quincey, 1985, pp 19-20). The Miasmatists were by far the majority, and despite their misunderstanding of the causes of the urban diseases, they often did some measure of good in combating them. For example, their attempts to diminish the bad smells through sewering and drains would have helped minimise water contamination and flooding of cellar dwellings.

There were some attempts to clean up cities after the first outbreak, but the person who really galvanised the nation in the cause was Edwin Chadwick. In 1832 the Prime Minister Earl Grey commissioned an enquiry into the effectiveness of the Poor Laws and Chadwick was to play an instrumental part, writing around a third of the finished report, which was published in 1834. As a result of the report, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed, which did little to improve conditions for the poor and in fact abolished certain measures of poor relief, which earned Chadwick enemies. He had, however, proven himself to the Liberal government, and was asked to carry out an enquiry into sanitation in London after influenza and typhoid outbreaks. His report was published in 1842 during Sir Robert Peel’s Conservative government. The emotive language used in Chadwick’s reports echoed popular writers such as Dickens and Gaskell but also appealed to the Utilitarian love of facts and figures and when Peel’s government refused to take action based Chadwick’s recommendations, the Health of Towns pressure group was formed to persuade them to reconsider (Spartacus Educational, no date).

It wasn’t until Lord John Russell and his new Liberal government took power that Chadwick’s findings were used. Following fear of a cholera outbreak, the Whig Act of 1848 was passed. It created a General Board of Health – of which Chadwick was one of three members – and called for the creation of Local Boards of Health where town councils did not exist (Briggs, 2000, p.288). Despite plenty of ideas regarding clean water, sewage and water closets, Chadwick had amassed many enemies and his attempts at change were successfully defeated by landowners and others with vested interests and laissez faire philosophies:

… [Chadwick] was determined that the British world should be clean and live a century, but on one condition only – that they consented to purchase the real patent Chadwickian soap, the Chadwickian officially-gathered soft water and the true impermeable telescopic earthware pipes, and when they did die, were interred by his official undertakers in the Chadwickian necropolis (Engineers and Officials cited in Tonge and Quincey, 1985, p.42).

Despite another cholera outbreak in 1853, the General Board of Health was disbanded after Chadwick agreed to retire in order to protect his existing reforms (Spartacus Educational, no date). Medical matters were returned to the control of the Privy Council, which appointed Sir John Simon as its Chief Medical Officer (Tonge and Quincey, 1985, p.43). Meanwhile, science had made a breakthrough. John Snow, a doctor in Soho, had serious doubts about the miasmatists theory of the spread of cholera. He had experienced breakouts, and believed that cholera was passed by contaminated water supplies. He effectively proved this during the 1848 outbreak, implicating a single pump. Among other findings, he recommended boiling drinking water. His ideas were first published in 1849 but were largely ignored due to the powerful influence of the miasmatists. A later, much more detailed edition of his work was published in 1855, but he died in 1858, never having received any recognition for his efforts (Tonge and Quincey, 1985, p.47). Simon, though, successfully continued to work in his role as Chief Medical Officer, diverting public funds into research on diseases such as typhoid and smallpox. Scientific advances had also vastly improved medicine. The stethoscope appeared, improvements were made in microscopes in order to observe the mico-organisms which Pasteur had discovered in the 1850s, antiseptic surgical procedures were pioneered, and anaesthetics were introduced. Medicine was starting to take its steps firmly into science, just as Britain started to cast off its laissez faire past and venture into collectivism (Robinson, 2009).

The Public Health Act of 1875 introduced legislation to regulate conditions which allowed diseases such as cholera to spread. It eventually led to reforms in the construction of housing and called for all new housing built to include sewage, running water and an internal drainage system (Robinson, 2009). The old mindset of the law and order state was gone, replaced by the idea that the state had a responsibility to account for the welfare of its citizens. Along with the Conservative Reform Acts of 1867, which extended the right to vote to 1.5 million more men, and the Liberal Reform and Redistribution Act of 1884/1885, which extended the vote to 6 million more men, the social welfare of common people had much improved. It was still an issue, however, in the public mind. The writings of Booth and Rowntree gave insight into poverty within society, with concepts such as the ‘poverty cycle’ and the ‘poverty line’ taking shape at around the turn of the century. Another example of this appetite for reform was the report into the conditions of the Boer War recruits. The findings revealed an embarrassing amount of poverty related illness, severely impacting the numbers suitable for military service (May, 1996 pp 336-338).

Although many acts were passed after the turn of the century, the most significant in terms of public health was the National Insurance Act of 1911, which was championed through Parliament by David Lloyd George, who had a working class background and had a personal history with disease. The act set aside money weekly from the worker, the employer and the state in order to provide medical treatment for workers, but was by no means a unified system of healthcare. The reforms during this period are seen by some as the beginnings of the welfare state but by others just an attempt to protect the capitalist system from competition abroad and socialism (May, 1996 pp 343-345).

This idea of protecting the system can also be seen in the aftermath of the first world war. The war had left over a million men injured seriously and hundreds of thousands dead, but it had strengthened the relatively new Labour party. Fear of revolution, pressure from this new Labour threat, and a desire to see Britain improved to make all of the sacrifice worthwhile saw the Liberals in control and committed to reform with David Lloyd George as their leader. The vote was extended again, this time to all men over 21 and all women over 30, who eventually received the same voting status as men in 1928. Also introduced in 1919 was the eight-hour work day, dramatically improving the health and welfare of workers (May, 1996 p.364). The Housing Act of 1919 was also introduced, introducing the first council houses. While it improved the health problems associated with overcrowding, it failed to address the housing needs of the unemployed and truly poor. However, further changes in legislation throughout the 1920s by the Labour and Conservative parties cemented the role of council houses within the nation’s collectivist identity (May, 1996 p.393).

The Second World War was a time of great hardship for Britain, and the hospitals were stretched to their limits. The Emergency Hospital Service was created in 1938. The role of this service was initially constructed for air raid casualties, but eventually extended to other types of patients. William Beveridge emerged during the war as an important figure, compared to the likes of Bentham. His Beveridge Report was published in 1942, in which he proposed a unified system of social welfare, encompassing ideas such as a national health service and social insurance (May, 1996 p.406). It was by using the basis of these proposals that Labour came to power in 1945 following the end of the war. While a complete transformation of society never happened and the years following the war were difficult, Britain had introduced the welfare state.

It is clear, therefore, that vast social change occurred from 1750 to 1950 and that public health was at the heart of it. The lens of public health demonstrates not only the vast change in societal ideology, but the impact that the issues surrounding public health had upon the political decisions. The movement of the public’s ideas about the role of government and the government’s shift from an individualist law and order state to a collectivist welfare state are perfectly illustrated by the vast change within the issue of public health.

2250 words

Bibliography

BBC – History – British History in depth: Prime Ministers and Politics Timeline. [online] Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/timelines/primeministers_pol/index_embed.shtml (Accessed: 14 March 2010)

Briggs, A. (2000) The Age of Improvement. 2nd edition. Longman.

de Pennington, J. (2009) BBC – History – British History in depth: Beneath the Surface: Social Reports as Primary Sources. [online] Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/source_bsurface_01.shtml (Accessed: 11 March 2010)

Edwin Chadwick. [online] Available from: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PHchadwick.htm (Accessed: 13 March 2010)

May, T. (1996) An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1760-1990. 2nd edition. Longman.

Robinson, B. (2009) BBC – History – British History in depth: Vistorian Medicine – From Fluke to Theory. [online] Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/victorian_medicine_01.shtml (Accessed: 10 March 2010)

Thompson, F. (ed.) (1990) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950 Volume 1 Regions and Communities. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

Thompson, F. (ed.) (1990) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950 Volume 2 People and Their Environment. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

Tongue, N. and Quincey, M. (1985) Cholera and Public Health. Houndsmills and London: Macmillan Education Ltd.

Cultural Studies – Representing Gender – Close Reading of Drowning Girl by Roy Lichtenstein

Cultural Studies – Representing Gender – Close Reading of Drowning Girl by Roy Lichtenstein

Drowning Girl is a 1963 painting by American pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein and other pop artists of this era were challenging the concepts behind traditional art and expressing new ideas in relation to issues such as gender. Rather than focusing on simply capturing a subject like traditional paintings, Drowning Girl is made up of melodramatic content appropriated and adapted from comics. By altering this content and reintroducing the signatures of mass production, Lichtenstein ultimately subverts this material, turning the focus on the portrayal of gender within the media and greater society. This exposes a process of construction within societal concepts of gender, coinciding with Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that ‘one is not born a woman, but, rather becomes one.’ (Beauvoir cited in Storey, 2006:124)

The painting focuses on a single dark-haired female character, crying and surrounded by a torrent of swirling waves. A speech bubble appears above her head, encasing the words, “I don’t care! I’d rather sink — than call Brad for help!” The woman’s head is just visible above the waves, along with her right shoulder. Her left hand is also above the surface of the water, and we can see that she has fairly long, seemingly manicured fingernails. The waves themselves seem tumultuous but small, seeming to suggest an overly dramatic view of the situation on the part of the woman. This could in itself suggest some inherent weakness in women, but it also seems to suggest some sort of fault within the male gaze of art and media, which repeatedly cast women in these predictable, melodramatic roles.

The surrounding colour of the waves seems in some ways a tip of the hat to abstract expressionist painters such as Willem de Kooning, who often depicted women within a sea of colour and strong brush strokes. Lichtenstein was at times an expressionist himself; however his best known works were adapted from comics and painted in oil and Manga paint. He claimed that the wave was adapted from the famous wave painting by the Japanese artist Hokusai, which can also be seen in the way the wave crests in a decorative fashion. Completely converse to these artistic flairs, however, is one of the things which made Lichtenstein’s work stand out. His use of hand-painted Benday dots was a simulation of the mass production techniques used in printing comics and advertisements. This use of the commercial touch reinforces this idea about construction of the subject’s gender. We get the sense that there is something false or unoriginal about the situation, though the artist himself appears to make no such judgment. By using form and style which is familiar to the viewer, Lichtenstein empowers us to make our own judgments about the piece.

While Lichtenstein has scaled this art up vastly and has hand painted all of the details, he has essentially gone to great effort to reproduce something very similar to its original source, which was entitled Run for Love! and was published by DC Comics in 1962. Drowning Girl has been cropped from the original image, which included the woman’s boyfriend, hanging on to a wrecked boat in the background. Lichtenstein also altered the text within the image, changing the name Mal to a more common American name, Brad. He also changed the text ‘I don’t care if I have a cramp’ to a more vague and mysterious ‘I don’t care’ which creates a vast gap in interpretation. Having cropped the image so dramatically to the woman and by removing the reference to the cramp, Lichtenstein removes all other information and invites us to focus on the narrative. We begin to ask questions about this woman’s relationship with the Brad character, who also appears in relationships with other women in Lichtenstein’s work. We wonder how badly he has hurt her, what transpired between them, and how she could possibly be so weakened by this man that she would submit so easily to her own demise. It becomes a stereotypical image of the melodramatic, almost too ridiculous to take seriously. We see a woman who typifies the comic representation of feminine beauty as she cries and mentally breaks down because of some personal catastrophe regarding her relationship with the absent Brad. This can be seen as a parody of the commercial comic, which used stereotype and oversimplification of people, gender, action and emotion in order to cater to the popular opinion, essentially equating to the male gaze. The fact that these images and stories are familiar to the viewer can in some ways be seen to suggest a certain level of complicity on their part, given that they are part of the market for these commercial products.

Drowning Girl successfully subverts both form and content by abstracting them from the central plot, in essence defamiliarising comic strips and asking us to look closer. Without making a single evident judgment, the hand-simulated commercial form and the altered vague narrative trivialise and generalize the life and emotion of the female character, providing insight into the commercial depiction of gender. We have no information as to why she is immersed in water, which leads to thoughts of suicide or even abandonment by Brad. At the same time, the presentation of the idealised comic-strip depiction of female beauty could lead some to interpretations involving nudity and eventually sexuality; especially given the exposed shoulder and delicate manicured hand. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of sex and death will ultimately lead to questions about the piece far beyond any questions or issues prompted by its original source.

In closing, it is clear that Drowning Girl exposes the process of construction associated with gender in society. By utilising the form of comic strips, Lichtenstein successfully takes on the tone and authority of popular advertising and mass production. His sophisticated use of these tools in order to expose and subvert their influence reveals the use of banal stereotype and trivialization to represent gender in society, in essence asking the reader to reconsider. Using the simulated signature of mass production and the altered litany of the comic within the piece, Lichtenstein exposes the melodramatic falsehoods inherent in these commercial depictions and suggests a sort of complicity on part of society for their acceptance and consumption of these views. Standing neutral, the piece makes no clear judgments itself while prompting the viewer to make his or her own.

Bibliography

Lichtenstein, R. (1963) Drowning Girl. Museum of Modern Art, New York. [online] Available from: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A3542&page_number=3&template_id=1&sort_order=1 (Accessed: 30 January 2010)

Run for Love! (1962) DC Comics. [online] Available from: http://academics.smcvt.edu/gblasdel/slides%20ar333/webpages/t.%20abruzzo,%20run%20for%20love.htm

Storey, J. (2006) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 4th edition. Harlow: Pearsons.

Happiness and Simplicity

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Louie Clearheart of The Love That I Am

Many of us have heard the saying, “live simply, simply live.” This is a key to happiness. It is when we make things too complex, or entertain too much drama in our lives (or more frequently our thoughts), that pain comes, suffering comes, and unhappiness comes.

Surprisingly, many of us are addicted to drama. We identify with it: all of the thoughts around excuses, reasons, judgments and justifications, or the endless “what if…?” scenarios we may play in our minds. Without all that, “who would we be?” we think.

Actually, a better question is, “what would we be?”

And the answer?

Happy.

In Defense of Harry Potter – The Tao of Self Analysis

Throughout the largest portion of my adult life, I have maintained what can best be described as an air of pseudo-intellectualism. My view of the world can sometimes be characterized by elitist attitudes towards films, books and entire groups of people. I have set myself on a pedestal which has in fact prevented any real growth from occurring within me. One way this attitude manifested itself was through my utter distaste and contempt for the Harry Potter series. I had come to associate Harry Potter with popular culture and had imposed upon that popular culture a value judgement of inferiority. Quite simply, I considered the books beneath me; inherently inferior because of their popularity. I had not read them, disregarding completely the old warning against judging a book by its cover.

This idea of popular culture being inferior is not new to cultural studies. There are many definitions of popular culture itself, but one way it can be defined would be to come to the conclusion that popular culture is all that is left after high culture is removed. The exclusivity and elite nature of this high culture means that the remnants are condemned to the ‘lesser’ category of popular culture. Practices, people, art, texts, and film (and any number of other things) which do not meet the strict standards required will fall into this category, rendering them by definition inferior. The trick about all of this is that all of the criteria involved are merely value judgements which support distinctions in social and economic class as well as an essentially myth-based concept of quality. The problem comes with the additional definitions of popular culture. Obviously one definition is that it is popular. Things which fall under the category of popular culture tend to be favored or regarded by many people. The simple fact is that the popular outnumbers the high by far, and the only barrier to the popular being legitimized is in fact the small minority which is attached to the interests of high culture.

Why I ended up associating myself with high culture, I do not know. An inflated ego, a need to feel that my opinions were more important than those of others – the truth is that it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that as a result of my interest in Taoism, my ideas began to shift. Through a process of self reflection, I realized how out of control my ego was. While I’m always going to have opinions and I’m always going to value some things over others, I realized how silly it sounds to judge something without really knowing anything about it. I can hear a song and dislike it, but I can’t honestly judge an entire work of fiction by a news clip or a movie trailer. I decided to give Harry Potter a chance.

First of all, the Harry Potter series is obviously intended for an audience of kids, so it is important to bear that in mind when reading it. I tried to think about it in the same way I would have been thinking about the Chronicles of Narnia series as I read it during my childhood. It is also important to think about the film franchise in this way as well. If there has been a huge Hollywood film for every Narnia book as a grew up, there is no doubt in my mind that my heart would have ached to see them. I don’t think that anything which gets kids reading can possibly be a bad thing. How could I think that, when the Narnia books gave me so much joy and eventually lead me down a path to become an aspiring writer?

Since my childhood, I have ready more fantasy novels than most people I know. While this could be considered good or bad by any number of people, it also leaves me in a position to understand the genre, at least to a certain extent. The Harry Potter series is neither the worst or the best I have read. The characters aren’t always extremely well fleshed out, but the use of setting is very good and the plot in the last couple of books is tied up in a very sophisticated way. I enjoyed the series, and isn’t that what matters? Rather than thinking so much about what other people will think of us, whether or not something is up to specific standards and all manners of in-depth analysis, shouldn’t we just live each moment for its individual and unique joy? When approached this way, as a child would approach them, these books have value. Whether that value is above or below you is up to you, but ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are ultimately a projection of the self. Taoism is concerned with the natural balance of things. In the creation of a concept of beauty, one creates the concept of ugliness by its lack, and vice versa. So does this apply to the idea of good and bad in the ordinary things of the world. It is an invention, a product of our own minds. There is no good. There is no bad. There only IS.

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