Author Archives: Raisa Tolchinsky

Tis a Pity

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Similar to our class discussion of doubling in “The Duchess of Malfi,” the first two acts of Ford’s play seem to reveal how Giovanni and Annabella (siblings) are in love because of their ‘sameness,’ a factor that normally obstructs erotic desire (we’ve previously explored this mirroring in Donne’s “The Cannonization”: “By us; we two being one, are it.”)

Annabella’s beauty is “the frame and composition” which Giovanni follows. He is not in love with her character, or her intelligence, or her “soul,” even though Neoplatonic tradition argues that the body is just a vessel for the soul (and that the soul will be released when the body dies).

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When reading the first act of The Duchess of Malfi, I couldn’t help but notice on page 1434, when Bosola states that “He and his brother are like plum trees that grow crooked over standing pools….” how this seems super similar to how Donne uses metaphor, in the sense that it is essentially a long extended metaphor.

Also, I was curious how the “geometry” of the body (“man’s head lies at that man’s foot”) which Webster speaks of could connect to the “symmetry” of the body Donne explores in his “Sappho” poem.

A Hymn to Christ

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It was interesting to read “A Hymn to Christ” and noticing the way, yet again, Donne inverts and twists a metaphor. When writing about a tree, he says, “as the tree’s sap doth seek the root below, in winter, in my winter now I go…” Rarely do we think about downward motion with nature: trees and flowers evoke imagery of growth, of blooming upwards. Usually the “movement” of literature is towards spring and summer, instead of winter. This is especially fascinating to me when taken in the context of religious imagery: “the tree of life”; “the tree of knowledge,” but also Ovid, and Pagan connotations. Any thoughts about how Donne uses nature to speak about religious themes in these poems?

Women & The Jacobean Era

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Reading the introduction in the Norton, I was curious about how the “entry of Englishwomen into authorship and publication” changed the literary climate. Although the Norton describes specific women authors and their work, I wonder how the fact that women had begun to write changed the artistic culture in this time period as a whole. I also wonder how this new addition contributed to the conflict between new and old, between capitalist and feudal.

Book of Common Prayer

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I was curious about the line:”in the time of man’s innocency, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his church.” It seems that “innocence” is often a gendered term, referring to chastity and virginity, so I was curious about the choice to refer to “man’s” innocency” here, and what that could signify. I also wonder about the phrase, “mystical union,” which seems to refer both a religious and metaphysical unification.

To His Coy Mistress

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Something I was thinking about for the reading this week was how the message of “To His Coy Mistress” parallels Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially the line, “The grave’s a fine and private place / But none, I think, do there, embrace.” Marvell seems to be urging the person he addresses in the poem to have sex with him because “they are young and alive” and there is time to be chaste when they are dead. This very much reminds me of the sentiments of the first 17 sonnets, which urge the young man to procreate.

Fiction and Friction / Shakespeare’s Globe

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One of the things that stuck out to me from Greenblatt’s article was his idea that most of the transformations and exchanges in Twelfth Night show how “men love women precisely as representations, a love the original performances of these plays literalized in the person of the boy actor” (93). With the Globe performance of Twelfth Night, we got a sense of how Renaissance theater used the body as a way to both reveal and trouble gender and sexuality; how women “pass through the state of being men in order to become women…. Shakespearean women are in this sense the representation of Shakespearean men” (92).  In order for a woman to really be a woman, she must have first been “legitimized” as a man.

History of Sexuality re: Sonnets

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I really liked the Foucault reading, more than I expected actually, and reading Marlowe’s sonnet and then Donne and Raleigh’s response, I couldn’t help but think about how it often feels like certain poems “confess” more than others. Marlowe’s sonnet is troubled and ultimately picked apart by Donne and Raleigh. It seems to have more meaning when read side by side with their responses. Re-reading Marlowe’s sonnet after reading all three, it seemed flimsy and almost absurd. There seems to be a certain pleasure, if that’s the word, in seeing the “truth” of the original sonnet unveiled. As Foucault says, “we must ask whether, since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis– under the guise of its decent positivism- has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica” (70).  Foucault’s article ultimately made me wonder how poetry is involved in “the production” of truth– this production perhaps requires a dialogue both between poems and within them.