Pamela's Virtue

I wrote this for a class I am taking on Women Writers. You can read the original blog post, and my classmates' own writing on Pamela, here: http://blogs.baylor.edu/britlit/category/pamela/

If you or anyone were to sit down and describe Pamela to me, I would insist that she is one of the most irritating characters I have ever heard of, and I would make a point never to touch a copy of Samuel Richardson's first epistolary novel. She has wisdom beyond her years but digs herself into deeper and deeper holes with everyone around her. She is clever and pert, but so easily shaken by verbal abuse alone that she cannot leave a room without clutching the wainscoting and promptly collapsing outside. She is pretty and nice, and that seems to be all that most people who meet Pamela require of her. I cannot say as much, but I can say this: Despite all these qualities, I like Pamela.

When Mr. B. goes after her, I tense up. When Mrs. Jewkes is cruel, my face scrunches into odd and angry shapes. When even Mrs. Jervis occasionally betrays her, I am nearly as upset as Pamela is.

I think this is because Pamela is a critical thinker.

It can be very hard for readers in this day and age to relate to someone who is all virtue. I'm sure even readers in Richardson's time would have had an issue understanding and relating to someone who was as morally strong as Pamela (this is not an indication of total support for Pamela's moral compass, rather support for how voraciously she follows it), but the differences between socially popular moral theory in 1740 versus 2013 certainly increase the gap of understanding. However, Pamela has trouble with one virtue that was considered absolutely necessary in her time (especially for her station and her sex), and that is obedience. This is not to say Pamela is disobedient all the time, but she is certainly critical of her and others' orders and instructions.

When asked to stay at Mr. B.'s to finish flowering his waistcoat, she does that; but when asked to stay another fortnight to consider a marriage arrangement, she tries to leave under the radar. Her pertness arises from finding clever and witty ways to be obedient and/or responsive without actually doing what Mr. B. wants.

Furthermore, it is clear that Pamela is not disobedient merely to push boundaries--that would make her more irritating, rather than more relatable--rather she disobeys because her moral compass is critical enough to tell her when she must disobey.

Despite the fact that Mr. B. is her master, and everyone else in the novel seems to think that his word is the word of God, she refuses his advances again and again. She refuses his gifts over and over and over. When Mrs. Jervis betrays Pamela's confidence because Mr. B. asked to hide in her closet to listen to the conversation between them, Pamela cannot understand how Mrs. Jervis, a good woman plus or minus some blind obediance, would do such a thing. When he or Mrs. Jewkes (under Mr. B.'s orders) try to keep Pamela from writing, she divides her ink and pens and paper and hides them all variously, and this brings us to the matter of Mrs. Jewkes! It is in a particular dialogue between Pamela and Mrs. Jewkes that the matter of critical obediance and disobediance becomes all too clear. Pamela questions her whether Mrs. Jewkes would do anything, anything at all that Mr. B. asks--of course she would, he is her master. Would she slit Pamela's throat, if commanded? Well, no, that would be murder-- but then, would she assist Mr. B. in raping Pamela?

Well, yes, obviously.

Mrs. Jewkes says that men and women were made for each other, and Pamela is a pretty young thing and so Mr. B. must desire her, and if he sees it within his grasp to get what he desires, then Mrs. Jewkes sees no reason why he shouldn't have it, with or without her help.

This above all is what disgusted me with Mrs. Jewkes, and this above all is what I found to respect in Pamela: that she not only cannot obey an order she thinks is morally wrong, she cannot possibly conceive of how anyone else could ever do so.

Regarding School and Real Life

     Growing up, I often struggled between loving to learn and hating to go to school.

     I went to school and often enjoyed it simply because I loved to learn, but hated memorizing things that I thought were essentially useless, or at least not taught in a way that made them engaging and made their use apparent. I was always learning on my own, pursuing extracurricular interests, and reading voraciously--in fact, I spent most of fourth grade reading under my desk with my head on the table as if I had a terrible headache; I even thought I'd been clever enough to get away with it until the last day of school when Mrs. Takashima congratulated all of us on a "year well done, even those of us who spent the whole thing reading under their desks."

     I was embarrassed to have been caught, but looking back I'm really glad that Mrs. Takashima recognized how valuable my love of reading was to my education, and that in the grand scheme of things, as long as I was doing the work and passing the tests (and I always did very well), and as long as I was not being disruptive, that it was alright for me to pursue learning on my own, even in her class. Man, what a great teacher.

    The next year my family moved cities and school districts, and because of the different district requirements my parents seriously considered having me repeat fourth grade over again. Thank god they saw sense and didn't--thirteen years of public school was tedious enough without repeating one of them.

     I often wished I could go to some other school... a private school or a boarding school where they only taught things I was interested in... or some fantasy school in my mind. Or, I wished I had a governess like so many of the characters I read about had in their books, to teach me languages and history and math in a way that was interactive and engaging, and at a pace that moved as quickly as I learned without having to wait for 35 other students to not only understand the material but to settle down and stop talking (the settling down often took much longer than the learning, after all).

     What I'm getting to with all this is that I think I would like to homeschool my children. Obviously, we're talking a good many years from now, because I'm currently 20, unmarried, and unemployed, and you certainly cannot homeschool children you don't have. However, I really think I could offer my children a much fuller, more engaging, more interesting, and more well-rounded experience than the one public school was able to offer me. I managed to get a lot more out of public school than many students do, because I filled waiting time with reading and drawing and writing; I pursued the study of foreign languages independently; I was fortunate enough to have parents who were in a position to put me in piano lessons, voice lessons, girl scouts, drum lessons, art lessons, cotillion, band, choir, opera... you name it; and especially because my parents were very involved in my learning.

     My dad is a chemistry professor at Caltech, and every year of elementary school (and even once in middle school), he would arrange to come in and do fun science demonstrations for the class: the whole class got to see a pickle become a lightbulb; they got to see seven beakers of rainbow liquid poured into each other all become clear and mixed again became the seven colors of the rainbow again; they got to see a marshmallow expand to twenty times its size in a vaccuum and then shrink down to the size of a raisin. They got to see all these things, but I got to go into the lab and learn how it all worked, and help engineer each experiment so it would work on the big day.

     My mom is a doctor, and one of the most multi-talented people I've ever met. Any medical questions I had have always received (long-winded but) detailed explanatory answers. She grew up in Texas going to school with astronauts' children, and fascinated by space and space exploration, and when I was in kindergarten she helped my whole class build a moonscape and a papier mache Apollo 13, she sewed two kindergartener-sized astronaut suits and took pictures of my whole class. She loved to garden, and built an animal garden with my third-grade class (butterfly bush, kangaroo paw, zebra grass, snail vine, etc...). I remember riding in the car while she drove to a not-nearby museum to borrow their giant plastic model of a flower so that she could teach my class about plant sex organs. She taught me to sew and she taught me to cook, and I'm still learning from her all the time. I will never be as good as she is at decorating cakes.

     Both my parents travel often--my dad would always tell me stories about his business travels, and my mom would plan our camping trips and other excursions for weeks. Even vacations I was not always excited about before (I didn't always know how good I had it) have become integral to the way I see the world around me.

     I am absolutely certain that I have learned at least twice as much from my parents as I have from my teachers before college, and I still have much more to learn from them. Beyond that, I am fairly certain that, with the flexibility to work with the pace, interests, talents, strengths, and weaknesses of my own children, I could teach them much better than a public school system could. Mind, I don't say this out of disrespect for teachers: I strongly admire and believe in the public education system and have often considered becoming a teacher myself; my boyfriend is a substitute teacher, and I respect the work that is done in the public school system infinitely, but if a child's parents are passionate about their child's learning, and able to foster and support it, I don't believe that the public school system is able, by nature of its size, to offer the depth that a one-on-one (or at most a few-on-one), individually-tailored, home-based, exploratory education experience can offer.

     That said, I don't understand how anyone can afford to own a home, let alone own a home with children in it on one income. I know there are people who do manage to do this, but as an about-to-be-college-senior hoping to move to Austin after I graduate, I can hardly even imagine renting an apartment on one income. I don't think I'll have to, but it's still a scary prospect. It's for this reason only that I regret my fancy create-your-own-not-science-major; I do believe that I am a more well-rounded and better-educated person for having studied the things I've studied, but they're not about to get me into medical school and I don't want to go to medical school anyway.

     I decided to study English and Japanese and Art because those are the things that interested me, but I've recognized recently that if I'm ever going to be able to manage my own finances, let alone have my own finances to manage, I'm going to have to get good at it now, and I'm going to have to become employable now. There is no time to wait until I am unemployed--that's not something I can afford. So, I've spent the last few days updating my Linkedin and my resume, today I made (and handpainted) business cards (in Japanese and English), and I've been researching jobs for which I am or can become qualified and which hopefully would not bore me to death. Next semester I'm registered to continue my study of Japanese, and I'm taking a class on Entrepreneurship. I'm also finishing up the requirements for my degree program and starting work on my Honors thesis(!).

     Because of my artsy, liberal, non-conformist side, I've always kind of shied away from "corporate" ideas like networking, business cards, linkedin, suits, natural hair colors, and desks... because I held the attitude that "If a company doesn't want to hire someone with blue hair, then I don't want to work for them," but the truth of the matter is it may not be that the company discriminates against alternative taste--if you are looking for a serious job with blue hair, it says that you are not willing to compromise to be a part of their company, which is something that you absolutely have to do. If I'm not willing to make a compromise on something as trivial as my hair, why should they pay me? They shouldn't. So, I'll also be phasing out the blue hair this year. I'm going to miss it, and someday I fully expect to be a member of the rainbow head club again--once I've proved myself in the workforce and have a good enough reputation that my hair will not precede me.

     My current plan/goal/strategy is this: work for and learn from established companies/organizations/etc., to gain experience, real world workforce knowledge, connections, and funding for my own projects; in the meantime, write, do art, and develop my own business plan/s; and start my own business(es) and get them functional enough that I have flexible work hours and/or can work from home. At that point, perhaps I will be able to afford the time and money to have and homeschool children. Those last steps are a long way ahead, and I know it... but the years are going faster than ever, and I want to be able to give my children a childhood of experiences that is as good as or better than what I was blessed to grow up with, and if I can't do that, then I can't afford to have children.

     P.S.~I'll be posting more soon about homeschooling thoughts and the future, because that's what I've been thinking about recently, and these thoughts I deem important enough to keep around for future reference, so there you go.

   

The Infinite Library

I should probably tell you why this blog is located at myinfinitelibrary.blogspot.com, why it is my infinite library, and what an infinite library is.

I don't have all the answers. That's what an infinite library is not.

In fact, my infinite library is very different from other infinite libraries. It's a concept that was introduced to me by a professor from Germany who taught a course called Modernism and Beyond in European and World Literature to me when I studied abroad at Universiteit Maastricht in the Spring semester of 2012.

I liked this professor because he knew we would not like everything we read in his class, and he did not ask us to like it or even try to like it--he only asked us to try to appreciate it and learn from it, and to try to understand why we did or did not like each book we read. What all did we read? Gosh... Demian, Nadja, To the Lighthouse, Heart of Darkness, "The Wasteland," "Waiting for Godot," Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man... perhaps something else. That sounds comprehensive to me. Perhaps I'll talk about those books later. Demian in particular changed the way I look at the world, and it was fantastic. I regret that the books were provided by the school and I did not get to keep my notes.

In any case, the professor presented in passing an idea he called the infinite library, and which I have probably revised since hearing it. This idea is the biggest thing I garnered from this class, and has changed my world view more than anything we read or anything else we talked about. I vaguely remember him crediting this idea to T.S. Eliot, but have found nothing to support that. There is apparently an infinite library concept introduced by Terry Pratchett, but it is rather different insofar as I can tell. The infinite library as I think of it is this:

When you are born, your infinite library is essentially empty. It is an infinite room full of infinite shelves full of no books at all. From that point on, every single thing you hear, taste, smell, read, touch, or experience becomes a book in your infinite library--but each book is not free-standing. Oh, no! Each book is affected by every single other book already in your infinite library, and as your infinite library grows, everything you experience thus become deeper and more multi-layered and more meaningful, more connected. In the physical world, a poem is the same every time someone reads it. The words stay the same in spelling, meaning, order, and juxtaposition; the punctuation is constant; the number of lines is unchanged; and so on. But the infinite library is another matter! In the infinite library, every time you read the same poem, an entirely new book is added to your infinite library, because it was an entirely different experience for you. Even if nothing else has changed, the second time you read it you already know how it is going to end--and more than likely, other things have changed. You may have undergone more and more varied struggles, you may have fallen in love, you may have read another book--and so this new experience of reading it is separate from the first and any other previous times you may have read it.

This can be applied to anything, not just literature--when I rode carousels as a child it was for the novelty alone; now it is for the novelty as well as for the nostalgia, and when I do I think of the carousel I rode in Paris and how it was next to a beignet stand and it was a foggy day; how all the horses on the Disneyland carousel are white so children don't fight over them; how Griffith Park refuses to accept help to refurbish their carousel; how I used to be a member of the Santa Monica carousel when I was very little, and once met Sean Penn and his kid there; what my own carousel would be like if I had one--you can have your very own for just over five hundred thousand dollars! (I know, I know... I can't afford that either)... and so on.

Anyhow, that is that. I don't know how much I'll talk about the infinite library on this blog, but I talk about it a lot in real life, so there you have it.

Happy New Year!