Classic Lit Is My Fav Genre

This is a sideblog of LeatherSunflowers where I post whatever classic literature related ideas and analyses that come to my brain.

Hi there!

I think using AI for anything is up to the user. And should be respected.

I don’t believe in using AI and then passing it off as your own work. But, AI can be helpful in a multitude of ways. Now I’m not a supporter, but I can understand the benefits.

I think using AI for literary analysis is like using it for academic writing. It’s a cheat. Literary analysis is tough, you have to really understand and have a point to prove before writing it. Which is probably why it’s the best for school essays, because there’s so much to learn and teach.

People who want to ask AI for an opinion on what the themes of Fahrenheit 451 are, have fun. But don’t say that it’s your own thoughts.

On the other hand, witch hunts: for me personally, I happen to have a very “choppy” writing style and I got slack for it all throughout school. With AI not knowing proper grammar I’ve been accused of using AI in my writing. Which I don’t, but that’s beside the point. (If you don’t believe me, I have works posted on ao3 to back me up)

I know this wasn’t your question but um, I think the whole culture of tearing down and bullying users who do use AI is a step too far. It’s wrong of them to pass up generated content as their own, but to be hated so avidly because of that seems to be wrong. People want to write, draw, etc and they can’t. Generative AI helps with that…ish. Witch hunting is very scary for actual writers/artists especially those like me, who have similar writing or art styles to generative AI. If you see someone using AI, just don’t engage. But the problem with the Witch Hunters is that they won’t take any excuse, they see something that maybe sorta resembles AI and it’s over. I just think it’s slightly pathetic and people should be spending their time on more meaningful things.

They’re really not.

Yes. On paper, they couldn’t be more different.

Elizabeth is witty. Jane is reserved. Elizabeth grew up surrounded by family. Jane grew up alone. Elizabeth’s story is bright, social, and full of banter. Jane’s is gothic, lonely, and haunted. But underneath all of that, they’re fighting the exact same battle. Neither of them will let someone else decide what their life should look like.

“I refuse to marry someone I do not love wholeheartedly, and I refuse to do something just because society says so.”

Elizabeth refuses Mr. Collins. Not because he’s poor. Not because he’s cruel. But because marrying someone she doesn’t love would mean giving up the right to choose for herself.

Jane refuses St. John. Not because he isn’t respectable. Not because he isn’t kind. But because she knows marrying him would slowly erase who she is. And I think that’s where the two novels quietly agree.

People tend to describe Elizabeth as someone who marries for love. I don’t think that’s entirely true. She marries for respect. Love follows.

The reason she rejects Darcy the first time isn’t because she doesn’t love him. She doesn’t know him well enough to love him. She rejects him because she believes he lacks the qualities she refuses to compromise on. Only after Darcy changes—and only after Elizabeth realizes she judged him unfairly—can they meet as equals.

Jane follows the same pattern. People love talking about Rochester’s redemption. But I don’t think Jane Eyre is actually Rochester’s story.

It’s Jane’s.

Every major choice she makes is a refusal to lose herself. She leaves Gateshead. She leaves Lowood. She leaves Thornfield. Not because she’s running away. Because she refuses to compromise the one quality that defines her. Throughout the novel, Jane is self-affirming even amid the gravest adversities. That quality is impossible to repress. Even when she loves Rochester, she refuses to become his mistress because she knows that love at the cost of her own principles isn’t really love.

That’s what makes both novels feel surprisingly modern.

Neither heroine allows love to become the loss of self.

And I think that’s why both women are constantly described as “stubborn.” It’s funny how literature has a habit of calling women stubborn whenever they insist on having standards. Elizabeth is criticized for rejecting Mr. Collins and initially refusing Darcy. Jane is told she’s foolish for leaving Rochester and later for refusing St. John.

From everyone else’s perspective, they’re throwing away perfectly good futures. Security. Status. Comfort. From theirs, they’re protecting something far more valuable.

Themselves.

Both novels quietly argue that losing yourself is far more dangerous than losing an opportunity.

Maybe that’s why Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet have endured for centuries and are still being shown in media today. Not because they found the perfect man. But because people almost always succumb to peer pressure and allow society to reshape their opinions.

They don’t.

Jane never lets anyone else’s expectations define her conscience. Elizabeth never lets anyone else’s expectations define her judgment. They stay strong and keep to what they believe in, through thick and thin, no matter what.

It’s usually not.

People love talking about John. Or Rochester. Or Mr. Mallard. Or even Bertha Mason.

But if you actually read the novels, none of them are the real problem.

They’re symptoms.

Take The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: John is overbearing. He’s dismissive. He’s convinced that because he’s both a husband and a physician, he knows what’s best.

But John didn’t invent the “rest cure.”

He believes in it because everyone around him does. He’s enforcing a system that’s already there.

The same thing happens in The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin.

People sometimes read the story as though Louise celebrates her husband’s death because he was abusive. But Chopin never says that. In fact, she goes out of her way to tell us that he was kind. That she loved him.

Sometimes.

The tragedy isn’t that Brently Mallard was cruel. It’s that even a loving marriage still wasn’t freedom, which is a much more uncomfortable thing to admit.

Then there’s Jane Eyre.

People love arguing about whether Rochester is romantic or manipulative. And… he is manipulative. He lies. He tests Jane. He tries to make her jealous. He asks her to become his mistress. None of that is admirable. But I don’t think Charlotte Brontë is asking us whether Rochester deserves Jane.

I think she’s asking whether Jane deserves herself. Every major decision Jane makes isn’t about love. It’s about refusing to lose her identity. She leaves Gateshead because she refuses humiliation. She leaves Lowood because she refuses stagnation. She leaves Thornfield because she refuses to betray her conscience. She rejects St. John because she refuses to sacrifice herself for someone else’s purpose. Only after proving she can exist without Rochester does she choose to return to him.

Because love isn’t freedom if you disappear inside it, and suddenly all three stories become the same story. A woman isn’t trapped because one man is evil. She’s trapped because society keeps confusing love with ownership. Concern with control. Protection with confinement. The men aren’t always villains. Sometimes they’re just doing exactly what society taught them a good husband should do.

Which almost makes it worse. Because if the problem were one bad man… The solution would be easy. Instead, these authors suggest something much more unsettling. The greatest prison isn’t built by one person. It’s built by thousands of ordinary people who all believe they’re doing the right thing.

Maybe that’s why these stories still resonate. Not because we’ve eliminated those systems. But because we’ve gotten better at hiding them.

At the beginning, wealth is land. The Joads have a farm. Then they don’t. So naturally they spend the rest of the novel trying to earn money so they can survive.

Except… that’s not actually what Steinbeck spends the novel measuring. Instead, he keeps measuring things that can’t be bought. Who shares their food. Who gives someone a ride. Who stays behind to help fix a tire. Who makes room for another family in an overcrowded camp. Who stops.

Because that’s the strange thing about The Grapes of Wrath.

The people with power are always in a hurry. The bank has to foreclose today. The tractor has to keep moving. The peaches have to be destroyed before hungry people can eat them. The deputies have to keep the migrants moving. Everything is about efficiency. Everything is about profit. Everything is about making sure nothing slows the machine down.

Meanwhile, the Joads spend almost the entire novel being forced to stop. They stop because Grandpa dies. They stop because Grandma dies. They stop because someone is sick. They stop because the truck breaks down. They stop because another family needs help.

At first, those interruptions feel like failures. Every delay costs them money. Every delay costs them work. Every delay pushes California a little farther away. But Steinbeck keeps making something happen during those pauses. Casy develops his philosophy while sitting with other people. Tom changes because he spends time listening instead of running. The government camp feels different because people have enough time to dance, laugh, and know one another.

Even Ma Joad—who arguably does more than anyone else to keep the family alive—almost never creates anything the economy would call valuable. She cooks. She comforts. She mediates. She preserves. She keeps people together. None of those things make money. All of those things make survival possible.

And I don’t think that’s accidental.

Because every time the novel introduces someone with power, Steinbeck also takes away their humanity. The bank isn’t a person anymore. The company isn’t a person anymore. Even the tractor driver is described less like an individual than another part of the machine.

Everyone insists they don’t have a choice.

The bank blames the company. The company blames the market. The deputies blame “agitators.” The migrants blame one another for accepting lower wages. Nobody is responsible because responsibility has been spread so thin that it disappears. Which means the real conflict in The Grapes of Wrath isn’t between good people and bad people.

It’s between people and systems.

And systems don’t mourn. Systems don’t stop. Systems don’t wait for funerals.

People do.

That’s why the intercalary chapters are so important. They’re often dismissed as interruptions to the plot. But I think being interruptions is the point. The novel refuses to move at the speed capitalism demands. It keeps slowing down long enough for us to notice the people history usually skips over.

Which completely changes the title.

The “grapes of wrath” aren’t just the Joads’ anger.

They’re everyone’s.

Every family that’s been evicted. Every worker who’s been told they’re replaceable. Every child who’s gone hungry while food was deliberately destroyed to protect prices. That anger keeps growing because nobody can point to a single villain. Every time you think you’ve found one, Steinbeck zooms out another level. Until the antagonist isn’t a person anymore. It’s a machine that convinces everyone trapped inside it that they have no choice but to keep feeding it.

And that’s why Tom’s final speech matters so much. He stops asking how to save his family. He starts asking how to save everyone’s. Because once suffering stops belonging to one family, it becomes impossible to ignore. Which makes Rose of Sharon’s final act feel less like an ending than an answer.

Steinbeck spends an entire novel showing us a world organized around scarcity. His final image is someone giving away the only thing she has left. Not because generosity fixes injustice. But because it’s the one thing the system can’t force people to stop doing.

The Party in Orwell’s 1984 doesn’t care if you’re talented; it cares if you’re disobedient. The government in Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron doesn’t care if you’re obedient; it cares if you’re exceptional. Different methods. Same result: a world where the individual is always the problem.

The comparison becomes even more interesting when you look at what each government believes is dangerous.

In 1984, the Party’s greatest enemy isn’t intelligence, beauty, or athletic ability. It’s independent thought. Winston isn’t arrested because he’s particularly gifted; he’s arrested because he remembers, questions, and doubts. The Party would gladly allow outstanding people to exist if they used their talents to strengthen the regime. O’Brien is brilliant. Inner Party members are well-educated, articulate, and capable. Competence isn’t the threat; dissent is.

That philosophy is embodied in the Thought Police. They are not just secret police waiting to arrest people for breaking the law; they exist to identify individuals whose thoughts have begun to diverge from Party doctrine. The Party acknowledges that every revolution begins as an idea before it turns into an action. Someone who quietly questions history, language, or authority is therefore more dangerous than someone who commits a visible crime. The goal is to prevent individuality from forming internally before it can ever be expressed externally.

This is why the Party’s most powerful weapon is psychological rather than physical. Surveillance, Newspeak, propaganda, and torture all serve the same purpose: to make independent thought impossible. Citizens are expected not only to obey but to genuinely believe whatever the Party declares to be true. The ideal citizen is one who monitors their own mind before the Thought Police ever need to.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron turns that idea around. The government believes that differences are destabilizing. Intelligence, beauty, strength, grace, and artistic talent are all handicapped so no one can outshine anyone else. Harrison isn’t dangerous because he questions the government; he’s dangerous because he is extraordinary even before he speaks. His mere existence challenges the government’s idea of equality.

The handicaps themselves illustrate this philosophy. Instead of changing how people think, the government alters what people are able to do. Intelligent citizens wear mental handicap radios that interrupt their thoughts every few seconds with painful noises, preventing focused concentration. Beautiful people are forced to wear masks that conceal their features. Strong people carry heavy bags of birdshot to negate their physical advantages. Dancers wear weights so they cannot move gracefully. Every gift is treated as a social problem that needs to be fixed.

Ironically, these handicaps also suppress thought, though indirectly. The mental handicap radio doesn’t tell people what to think like Party propaganda does; it simply ensures they cannot think deeply enough to question anything. George Bergeron’s flashes of insight are literally shattered by blasts of noise before they can develop into coherent ideas. Winston’s thoughts are hunted down after they form. George’s are prevented from fully forming in the first place.

That’s why the two stories also have different relationships with the word equality.

In 1984, the Party isn’t aiming for equality at all. It openly promotes hierarchy. There are the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the proles. Big Brother doesn’t want everyone to be equal; he wants everyone beneath him. Equality is irrelevant because power is the real goal. Orwell’s famous idea that “power is power over human beings” explains the Party’s purpose: domination for its own sake.

In Harrison Bergeron, the government justifies its oppression by claiming it is creating equality. The satire lies in showing how a noble ideal can be twisted into something absurd when the pursuit of equality shifts from equal opportunity to enforced equality of outcome at every level of human life. Instead of lifting people up, the government drags everyone down until no one excels.

Even their methods of control reflect these opposing philosophies. Orwell’s government rewrites history, restricts language, monitors every home through telescreens, and employs the Thought Police because it fears what people believe. Vonnegut’s government hangs weights around necks, places radios in ears, and masks on faces because it fears what people naturally are.

Their endings reinforce these differences.

Winston is defeated psychologically. The Party doesn’t just eliminate rebels; it aims to eliminate rebellion from the mind itself. By the end of 1984, Winston genuinely loves Big Brother. The state has conquered not only his actions but his identity. The Party wins because Winston ceases to exist as an independent person long before his body dies.

Harrison, on the other hand, is simply executed on live television. His death is immediate, and the public forgets him almost instantly because they have been conditioned not to dwell on anything meaningful. George’s handicap radio interrupts his grief. Hazel cannot remember why she was crying. The government’s victory comes not from changing Harrison’s mind but from ensuring that no one else’s mind can hold onto his memory long enough for it to become resistance.

Both novels are primarily survival stories centered on extreme isolation. A man is stranded in an environment that is inherently hostile to human life and is forced to reconstruct civilization from scraps through creativity, effort, and persistent routines. Crusoe recovers tools from a shipwreck; Mark Watney takes stock of NASA equipment. Crusoe domesticates an island; Watney grows potatoes on Mars, one at a time. In both stories, survival becomes less an adventure than a prolonged exercise in systems: keeping track of supplies, solving practical issues, recording procedures, and turning disorder into order.

What makes the comparison interesting is how clearly the ideological differences reveal the values of the societies that produced them.

Robinson Crusoe is deeply shaped by Protestant individualism, early capitalism, and colonial ideology. Crusoe’s first instinct upon isolation is ownership. He catalogs, measures, organizes, and transforms the island into property. Nature exists to be subdued, categorized, and made productive. The novel treats labor as spiritually meaningful; Crusoe’s survival is repeatedly tied to providence, repentance, and divine order. Isolation becomes almost a moral condition through which he rebuilds both himself and a miniature version of European civilization. His practical intelligence is framed as evidence of moral worth, but that intelligence is inseparable from imperial logic.

The Martian, meanwhile, largely secularizes that framework. Watney survives not through fate but through scientific knowledge, institutional expertise, and collaborative systems. Even when he is physically alone, he is never conceptually isolated in the way Crusoe is. His survival depends on centuries of accumulated science and eventually on global cooperation. Where Crusoe embodies the fantasy of the self-made man, Watney represents the idea that humanity’s technological systems are collectively resilient enough to overcome disaster. Modernity itself accompanies him onto Mars.

The two novels also differ in how they portray “frontiers.” Crusoe’s island becomes colonial territory almost immediately; the narrative assumes his right to possess, organize, rename, and rule it. Mars in The Martian functions less as conquered land than as an engineering problem. The language of exploration remains, but the emphasis shifts from control to adaptation.

There’s also a major tonal contrast. Crusoe views isolation spiritually; the island becomes a place of repentance and a sign of divine intervention. Watney sees isolation scientifically. Problems exist to be solved through chemistry, botany, math, and engineering. Crusoe survives through faith reinforced by work; Watney survives through work that effectively replaces faith.

And yet, both novels are ultimately focused on the same fantasy: that human rationality can bring order to chaos. Both protagonists deal with isolation through routine, measurement, documentation, and labor. Survival becomes a process. Heroism turns bureaucratic. Keep track of supplies. Solve the next problem. Maintain the system. Survive one more day.

Which is probably why both books are strangely comforting despite being about extreme isolation. They turn survival into something orderly and easy to understand. The stranded man becomes a model of humanity boiled down to its basic tools: thought, work, adaptation, persistence.

SO for some reason (which I’m still trying to figure out) 19th-century Russia translated and published Edgar Allan Poe’s works even though American literature wasn’t really taken seriously by the Russian literary establishment at the time (and also, Poe wasn’t doing well in his own country’s literary climate.) Turns out, Russian critics thought Poe was doing something completely new. They weren’t interested in him because he was American; they were interested because his stories were these incredibly precise psychological studies of guilt, obsession, madness, and the human mind. That fit really well with where Russian literature was headed.

What’s even cooler is that in 1861, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s journal, Vremya. The translation was done by Elena Dostoevskaya, and Dostoevsky wrote the introduction, where he praised Poe’s originality and basically argued that what made Poe special was how psychologically believable he made even the most bizarre situations. Imagine being introduced to Poe by Dostoevsky himself. I’d trust that recommendation too.

BUT ANYWAY.

You can absolutely see Poe’s influence on Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment feels like The Tell-Tale Heart after being injected with 500 pages of philosophy, psychology, and existential suffering. Both stories are about murder, guilt, unreliable narrators, obsessive thinking, and watching someone’s mind completely unravel under the weight of their own conscience. That’s what this post is about.

What absolutely fries my brain is that Poe struggled for recognition in America during his lifetime, yet Russia looked at him and went, “Wait. This guy is onto something.” And they were RIGHT.

Both texts center on a murderer who tries to rationalize violence before being overwhelmed by the impossibility of escaping moral conscience. In Crime and Punishment, this is clearly linked to utilitarianism and the “extraordinary man” theory: Raskolnikov convinces himself that the pawnbroker’s death is justified because she is socially parasitic, insignificant in terms of material worth, and that her removal might ultimately lead to a greater good. The murder becomes a test of whether reason can surpass ethics.

Poe’s narrator adopts a disturbingly similar logic, even though he never states it explicitly in philosophical terms. He repeatedly insists that he loved the old man and had no material motive, which paradoxically strips the victim's social significance. The old man is depicted as isolated, passive, and narratively reduced to the “vulture eye”; his humanity is replaced by abstraction. The suggestion is that his death isn't a true loss to the world beyond the narrator’s personal obsession. In this way, the old man becomes disposable just like Alyona Ivanovna does for Raskolnikov. In both stories, the victim is turned into an ideological issue rather than being seen as a person.

What most strongly links the two texts is that both ultimately reject the idea that murder can be justified through detached logic. Each protagonist tries to turn killing into an act of reason rather than passion, but both are psychologically destroyed by guilt that shows itself as sensory torment: the heartbeat beneath the floorboards, the feverish paranoia and delirium haunting Raskolnikov.

There is also the striking parallel that both protagonists come to believe that everyone around them already knows the truth, despite little concrete evidence against them. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the police remain calm and unsuspecting, but the narrator becomes psychologically unable to interpret their composure as innocence; he projects his own guilt onto them until the imagined heartbeat becomes unbearable. Similarly, Porfiry Petrovich has no definitive proof against Raskolnikov for much of the novel, yet Raskolnikov interprets every conversation, pause, and implication as evidence that he has already been discovered. Their paranoia turns ordinary social interactions into imagined accusations. The police in Poe's story and Porfiry in Dostoevsky thus act less as purely legal figures and more as externalizations of the murderer’s own conscience.

And importantly, both men ultimately confess not because they are definitively caught, but because the psychological pressure becomes intolerable. The punishment in both works manifests internally before it appears externally. Conscience becomes inescapably embodied. The mind itself becomes the site of punishment.