THE OVAL PORTRAIT THROUGH THE LENS OF LIBERAL HUMANISM

Liberal Humanism is a traditional approach to English Studies that stems from the works of I.A Richards, William Empson and F. R Leavis. Liberal Humanists highlight the agency and value of human beings, both individually and collectively. They believe human beings essentially possess ‘free will’ and perceive themselves as well as thers based on experience. There are some underlying aspects of liberal humanism which have been made into the ‘ten tenets’. They serve as the guidelines and the core for studying a text from a liberal humanist viewpoint.

The text in question is Edgar Allen Poe’s, ‘The Oval Portrait’, is a classic

short story that narrates a tragic tale of a young girl. What’s interesting though is that there is no context given to the story. The narrator doesn’t identify himself, the chateau is non-descriptive nor does he dwell on the circumstances that got him there. The story makes sense in itself and doesn’t require the elaborate process of placing it within a context. This serves as one of the fundamental tenets of liberal humanism where a text should make sense in isolation. The socio-political, literary-historical circumstances and the autobiographical details or influences of the author need not be known for the text to make sense. Though some critics emphasize on the need to study context, liberal humanists counter it by stating that the ‘words on the page’ should be self sufficient and induce what’s called ‘on-sight close reading’, which allows for focus on nuances in the story.

The absence of a particular time-frame that allows it to be placed in any epoch and the use of understandable, everyday language makes it relatable to the audience no matter where and when they read it or what their beliefs or values are. This brings us to the next tenet that states that what marks a true literary piece is its timelessness or the fact that it can be read generations later and it would still make sense and be relatable to the reader. The story is gothic with a sense of eeriness that brought forward by the dark setting. The story talks about fear, beauty, love, passion and death. These are emotions which are universal and, for the lack of a better term, eternal. Thus, the story sits well with the tenet that “human nature is unchanging” and “continuity in literature is more important than innovation”;i.e. the storyline may change and new topics maybe discussed but they all should deal with the same human emotions that’s what makes the story relatable and impactful.

The story also brings out contrast between life and art. As liberal humanists put it, literature has the power within it to enhance human life and evoke powerful emotions that can move them but literature is not a means for propaganda. The story captures how art drives a character to madness, and a damsel whose love compels her to sacrifice her life with every stroke of her lovers brush. It brings out emotions of empathy and a diabolic exchange of life and death.

The story thus, fits well into the liberal humanism viewpoint. Though it can be studied from multiple viewpoints and the approach has been criticized by some, such as the structuralists, it stands on strong grounds and it can’t be refuted that it is one of the first and major ways of studying literary texts.

Literature and the Russian Formalists

“What is Literature?”  is a question that has been contemplated on for centuries. What distinguishes it from everyday writing and what are the characteristics. In her essay, What Is Literature?, Terry Eagleton explores these questions and the essence of literary theory. There is a difference between ‘literature’ and ‘Literature’. While any piece of writing can be literature; Literature has certain characteristic features. The author explains how literature can be defined as ‘imaginative’ and ‘fictional’, yet that’s not the clearest form of distinction for defining literature.

Literature is more easily definable through the language used than through whether the writing is creative and imaginative. The author talks about the literary theory of Russian Formalism which was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from 1910s to the 1930s. The critics were highly radical and skeptical who focused on differentiating between art and mystery so that there was emphasis on the functional role of literary devices. According to the Russian Formalists, literature was different from religion, psychology and sociology and rather was an organization on its own with its own distinctive structures and rules that guide it and through which it can be studied. Literary work should be studied objectively as a machine would be and not as a reflection of societal and psychological reality of the author and the time period. For the formalists, form was not the expression of content rather content was the motivation for the form. The author uses the example of Animal Farm to elucidate the point. From the Formalists point of view, the Animal Farm written by George Orwell is not an allegory for Stalinism rather Stalinism provided the opportunity for the construction of an allegory. The literary devices that are used in Literature are what sets them apart by making them ‘defamiliar’. Literature uses common, everyday language twists it using devices such as imagery, sound, syntax, meter, narrative technique. This makes the content hard to perceive forcing the audience to think in new ways. Thus, for the Formalists, saw literary language as a deviation from ordinary language.

The problem with this was what is defined as ordinary language. What is defined as ‘ordinary’ for scholars is different from what encompasses ‘ordinary’ for a common, working man. They also realized that norms changed from time to time based on the social and/or historical context. A piece of literature that is “estranging” to one group of people, or at one point of time does not guarantee that it will always remain so.  When a piece of literature loses this characteristic, it ceases to be a piece of literature. The literariness of a piece is not a property that’s eternal rather will change from one context to another. The Formalists therefore, defined what was literariness rather than literature.

Literature thus, cannot be studied as an ‘objective’ category far removed from what’s around it, neither is it anything and everything that people decide to call ‘literature’. The study of Literature is deep rooted in various structures that require value judgment. These value judgments change over context but have a strong relation to the ideologies of the time. Literary texts usually reflect this as well as the psychological state and thoughts of the author, which the Formalists had termed as redundant.  Studying literature out of this context,  doesn't give a proper understanding of the text.
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Bronte, reflected the Victorian society and the state of women in it. It also had certain autobiographical elements. This piece of literature, that has stood the test of time and is considered a classic literary text. Thus, Jane Eyre, has reflections from the life of author and the language used is not "defamiliarising" to the context it was written in. 

Emperor Jones and the Loss of Identity and Unhomely

‘Emperor Jones’ is a play written by Eugene O’Neil during the 1920s, that received great critical acclaim. The plot is a literary analyst’s dream, for it is an experimental play by O’Neil that delves and makes use of expressionism, Jungian psychoanalysis and the themes of race and identity. 

In her critical essay “Reconsidering Race, Language and Identity in The Emperor Jones” Michele Mendelssohn studies how the themes of race, identity and language are expressed through the journey of the protagonist. Mendelssohn analyses the play using Frantz Fanon’s racially embedded psychoanalytic theory to look at the themes and the shadows they cast. Jones tries to show his distance from the black community and his affiliation to a supposedly superior white race through his language, thought, religion and appearance. His thoughts are mostly reflected in his interactions with Smithers. In her essay Mendelssohn looks at the effect of colonization of not just the material world but of intellect as well. Jones’ conflict arises from his being both the ‘colonized and the colonizer’. His effort to internalize the language of the whites shows his intellectual colonization which he believes puts him above the others and the rite of passage to rule over the natives. His knowledge of the native language, he believes, is only so that he can communicate and exploit them to his benefit. He suns away the jungle and only makes use of it for the thrill of adventure, for hunting. The dark jungle almost comes to represent the black community, one he does not want to have any association with;"the colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle”.  He considers any association to the black community a pretense. Though Jones seems to be clear about his believes, it is clear that he is caught between two cultures. Mendelssohn also brings to notice how Jones compares the attempts to capture him made by the whites and the natives as Smithers warns him of it. This also brings out how Jones does not seem to belong anywhere, neither with the colonizers or the colonized.

Jones also tries to associate himself with the whites through his religion and appearance. His appearance is an amalgamation of stark black physical features while his clothes and grandeur reflected white superiority. He was also a Baptist, an English religion out of place in the native land. The author identifies the dress Jones wore as a uniform. The foreign nature of which is brought out as he advances through the jungle and gradually tears away his grand clothes one after another as he strips away at his unconscious as he faces “literal and metaphorical darkness”.

Jones has lost a sense of self doing everything to disassociate himself from the black community, to escape his past but not finding acceptance in a race whose values he tried so hard to follow. He only draws his identity from how he views the natives as inferior and the whites as what he aspires to be, but in the having no identity of his own. He ends up being ‘unhomed’, as he loses his roots and belonging anywhere. He places himself neither as an African nor an American. Thus, Emperor Jones is a story of a man who has lost his sense of identity in his quest for power. He is a man, who seems to be running away from the colonizers and the colonized, finding himself neither to be an American or African nor finding a middle ground. He is an homeless man with a lost sense of identity and Michele Mendelssohn's essay brings out these aspects clearly.