Raindrops on Roses

Portland Museum of Art

No, the red DOESN’T mean love or violence or passion, however the creators set it up so that in this particular work red means OH NO A SCARY GHOST IS HERE.

When I was in college (as a lit major) I ended up sitting down and talking to a returning student who was having trouble in one of our classes. He liked books, and he had GI bill money so he decided to be a lit major.

He was VERY confused about the “The Curtains Are Blue And It Means Something” approach to symbolism and I remember that he very seriously got out a notebook and a pen, sat down, and asked me “Okay so what to stars mean as a symbol?” 

And I was at a loss because of course I was! Stars-as-a-symbol can mean a thousand things and are heavily dependent on context. Are you reading a book about sea travel? Stars mean a map. Are you reading Maus? Stars represent faith and community and the way that the Nazis dehumanized Jewish people. Are you reading something by a romantic author who has a thing for the classics? Stars probably have something to do with heroism and destiny. Are you reading science fiction? Stars are probably just stars but if you’re reading Whipping Star by Frank Herbert they are literally people and our entire conception of stars is reexamined.

So one one the things that I think a lot of people are missing in their high school English classes is that whether the curtains are blue matters or not depends on the work.

The fact that Hamlet is wearing black is an important part of the story and the antagonist commenting on it it is almost the first thing that happens in the play.

What color dress is Lizzy wearing at the first dance in Pride & Prejudice? It doesn’t matter, the curtains are just blue.

And that’s one of those things that it takes a lot of time and a lot of exposure to different kinds of stories to learn and when you’re in high school you just don’t have that experience and your teachers are just now telling you for the first time “sometimes it matters why the curtains are blue” and I know you’re going “okay, sounds fake” but the goal is to get you to look at blue curtains and ask if they do matter, which is why they hand you books with big obvious examples of the kind of shit they’re talking about. You read A Tale of Two Cities because it’s full of binaries and line motifs and it’s the perfect thing to teach a fifteen year old how to look for a motif because there are a shitload of them. You read  The Scarlet Letter to look for color symbolism and to ferret out biblical allusions.

“The curtains are just blue” is just “yet another day has gone by and I haven’t needed algebra.” Most people aren’t going to need algebra in their day-to-day lives but it’s handy to know how to do a bit when you need it and it’s good to learn that the concept exists.

If you’re reading books just because they’re fun and you like them then that is cool and I’m glad you’re having a good time and you absolutely do not have to give a fuck about symbolism.

But I am going to laugh my ass off at you if you’re one of those folks who is like “the curtains are just blue it doesn’t matter” and then whines about why scifi and comics and cartoons and video games are all political these days. They were always political, you just couldn’t tell because the curtains were red.

And then they claim that the political SJW stuff in Dickens is subtle.

Which they differentiate from the penny dreadfuls and popular magazines of the time. Dickens was GOOD, not like that by-the-word popular crap.

Just for the record, if you’re not familiar with Dickens, here’s a little bit from his wikipedia bio:

His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5]Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience’s reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife’s chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.

Yeah, Dickens is nothing at all like the MCU with its crowd-pleasing shot of SJW WOMEN SUPERS trying to cash in on a moment. THE ENTIRE PLOT OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL IS WORKER’S RIGHTS WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???????????

Anyway.

Shakespeare is intensely political - what the fuck do you think the Richard plays are if not anti-Plantagenet propaganda?

Austen is WILDLY, VICIOUSLY political like seriously how many fucking times does Austen write about women who are getting absolutely fucked by the society that they’re living in and have to throw themselves on the mercy of kind relatives or hope that they can marry a kind husband spoilers it is all of the times, that is just a huge, ridiculous, outsized portion of what Austen wrote.

Mark Twain is mind-bogglingly political. You know what didn’t stand the test of time? Tom Sawyer, Detective. You know what did survive? The Adventures of Fuck Your Racist, White Supremacist System.

My university required that students take one of three Major Authors classes before they could graduate with a degree in English Literature. Our choices were Shakespeare (already discussed for his political commentary), Chaucer (whose negative characterization of the church was so overwhelming that it’s one of the jokes that actually made it in to A Knight’s Tale), and Milton, whose work you can only consider apolitical if you know absolutely nothing about Milton:

The reality is that if a work survives a hundred years most readers are not going to recognize the politics of the work. Shakespeare seems apolitical to an American audience only until we cast someone who looks like Donald Trump or Barack Obama to play Julius Caesar and THEN we get why there might have been something to do with politics in the original play.

This post initially got started because I’d been commenting on a post about Twin Peaks and its symbolism and there’s a joke in there about how the curtains are red, sure, but people got mad about the “political,” anti-nuclear messaging of the new series of Twin Peaks while totally overlooking the fact that the first two seasons are ENTIRELY AND ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ABOUT HOW A SOCIETY ALLOWED AN ABUSER TO FLOURISH UNCHECKED. That is not apolitical! This is a work that says “what if a society allowed a teenage girl to be sexually trafficked, to be forced into drug trade, to be physically and mentally abused, and still expected her to project normalcy? What happens to the girl and the society? What makes that possible?” and the answer is AN OLD EVIL IN THE WOODS THAT HAS ALWAYS EXISTED AND THAT EACH MAN HAS TO FACE IN HIMSELF OR BE LOST FOREVER TO DARKNESS . Twin Peaks is SO FUCKING POLITICAL.

And we’re still talking about it thirty years later because it was also good.

And this commenter is saying “we don’t remember shitty didactic novels because they were too political and were bad, if it was good and the politics didn’t clutter it up we remembered it” and no, bud, almost everything that DID survive is hardcore political in some way or another but you don’t have the historical context to feel it’s political in the same way that you feel including “gay people for the sake of gay people” is political.

OSCAR FUCKING WILDE DIDN’T GO TO PRISON FOR BEING AS QUEER AS A THREE DOLLAR BILL FOR YOU TO PRETEND THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST IS APOLITICAL.

Is it a cute play about cute characters saying witty things? Yes. It’s also about being separated from yourself and not knowing the fundamentals of who and what you are because that was taken away from you by the institutions society sets up to raise you. It is about falling in love with a name and wanting to have that name because it is what is named that allows you to safely function in society and have a pretty wife and cucumber sandwiches instead of being confirmed bachelors with your dear friend Jack who comes into your home uninvited to lounge beautifully on your sofa.

(reference for when i am trying to explain these to people and they are looking at me like “huh”):

the Bechdel test: does the story have a) more than one women, b) who talk to each other, c) about something other than a man.

the Ellen Willis test: if you flip the genders, does the story still make sense?

the Sexy Lamp test (courtesy of Kelly Sue DeConnick): can you replace your female character with a sexy lamp and still have the story work? if yes, YOU ARE A HACK.

the Mako Mori test: there is a) at least one female character, b) who gets her own narrative arc, c) that is not about supporting a man’s story.

the Tauriel test (which i made up in response to The Hobbit 2 [which passes] and Skyfall [which fails]): a) there is a woman, b) WHO IS GOOD AT HER JOB.

and in justification of my recent TV obsessions, i would like to note that Scandal, The Vampire Diaries, Buffy, and Nikita (ALL HAIL MAGGIE Q) pass all of these tests with flying colors.

UPDATE: i just discovered the Finkbeiner test and it is FANTASTIC.

FURTHER UPDATE: these were noted by oranges8hands and are EXCELLENT and add some much-needed intersectionality:

The Deggans Rule: a) At least two POC characters in the main cast, b) in a show that’s not about race.

The Racial Bechdel Test (I first saw it laid out by Alaya Dawn Johnson): a) it has two POC in it, b) who talk to each other, c) about something other than a white person

and then I offered an amendment to the Bechdel test: d) both women have to be alive at the end

FURTHER FURTHER update, from coelasquid (via oranges8hands)

“Women in tupperware” It’s like Women in refrigerators except instead of killing the lady and stuffing her in a fridge they incapacitate her during high stakes plot point and seal her away to preserve her freshness.

See: Every pivotal scene in Tom Cruise’s Oblivion movie.

new addition from boob-tube-reviews:

Russo test for LGBTQ+ characters:

The film contains a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender.

That character must not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity. (i.e. they are made up of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight characters from one another.)

happen to stumble upon an interesting article on jstor via google

turn on and log into your uni’s vpn client

click through 5 pages on the library’s website to go to jstor through the secured university-paid access line

find out for some reason said article isn’t included in the university-paid jstor access

copy the article’s name in your library’s search engine

come up with no results

copy the author’s name into your library’s search engine

find the article!

click on “full text access” 

have to log in to another university online system

find out it cancelled your search when logging in

start the search again

click on “full text access” again

cry in relief when the article actually opens and is downloadable

Appa: DIE BITCH