Fair point. Interestingly, I think Wilde's work (and also Dickens's) plays with the gap between the idealism of these rules and the reality they saw around them (rampant poverty, prostitution, religious and political hypocrisy, etc).
College student here! Thank you for reading this. Currently there's a storm so my books weren't delivered on time. This reading is due in class tomorrow. You're the only one who actually reads these lines rather than just summarizing.
The first thing to know--if my 14 years of independent research is correct--is that Charles Dickens didn't write "A Christmas Carol" at all. He merely hurriedly re-worked and commercialized the novella of an American couple, Mathew and Abby Whittier.
Incorrect statement about the entailment of Mr Bennett’s estate. The book clearly states that when he inherited his estate, it already had the provision of entailed to the closest male relative. It was not Mr Bennett’s decision. If he had had a son, the estate would have remained in his immediate family and the daughters would have had at a chance of being taken care of after his death by the son. It of course would not have been ideal because 2,000 lbs would not have been adequate for 5 unmarried sisters.
I was 10 when I first read Austin and the Brontë sisters books .. maybe because that was in the early 1960s and growing up in the UK I was well aware that P&P was not a romance and I was well able to understand the way people interacted in those olden days ….
I post this a few days after the beginning of the large scale cross-border attacks by Hamas gunmen from Gaza on Jewish Israeli communities that began on Saturday 7 October 2023 and have already left large numbers of civilians dead or abducted and are leading to large scale Israeli counterstrikes. I don't think these events yet have an agreed name, as past attacks and conflicts have with hindsight come to be generally known as '9/11', the First and Second Intifada, Yom Kippur War or Six Day War. However, this is not at all a political post and this literary/historical video about an Ancient Greek poem is not the place to discuss the rights and wrongs of what is happening in Israel and Gaza now. My point is simply this. At 13.40 - 15.17 Jay Pawlyk's commentary talks about the simile for expression of extreme grief of the tears and wailing of a woman whose husband has just been killed by invaders, which as Jay Pawlyk points out would have been a familiar sound to Odysseus during the years of the Trojan war. I gave some more thoughts about that in my Comment posted a couple of months ago, but while I suppose I was trying to imagine what the unfortunate widow's crying must have been like in those circumstances, it did not occur to me that a few weeks later I would actually hear it for real. However, it happened that earlier this week the British Sky News Channel was filming an interview with an Israeli woman called Shaylee Atary about her concerns for her husband who had been missing since an attack by Hamas on their kibbutz. She had last seen him blocking a window to their house against Hamas gumnen who were trying to get into their home that way, to allow her time to pick up their baby and escape through the front door. While this interview was being filmed, she received an urgent telephone call to tell her that her husband's dead body had been found, having taken a bullet to the head. Ms Atary begins a kind of terrible wailing with grief for her husband killed trying to protect his family from those who were invading their settlement. Apparently she and her family agreed that the footage of this could be made public, so that people around the World could have a sense of what the events we hear or read in the news mean at a human level. The full clip is only 90 seconds long but I think there is only a truncated version on RU-vid or news websites. (Sky News UK do not seem to have it on their website at all.) However, anyone who is on 'X' (formerly known as Twitter) can probably find the full thing if they search under Shaylee Atary.
For strict accuracy, I find that the Shaylee Atary interview I referred to above was actually with Sky News Australia, rather than Britain. Of course, the situations are not identical as, unlike the woman in the Odyssey, Ms Atary was not about to be enslaved, although, like the woman in the poem, she did know that in that moment the rest of her life had been changed irrevocably, probably for the worse. However, even the prospect of being enslaved by the enemy seemed to have a slight relevance to the present situation when I heard a hostage negotiation expert speak on a radio news programme this morning about the 200 or so people believed to have been violently abducted from Israel by Hamas as hostages. He was saying that while 2 of them, a mother and daughter from the USA captured while visiting relatives in Israel, had just been released for political or propaganda reasons, that, from experience, Hamas would be completely unmoved by appeals to set hostages free on humanitarian grounds. They saw the hostages they had captured purely in terms of their monetary or material value. If he is right, it reminds me of the attitude that Homer's warriors often seem to take to the people of enemy nations they enslave in war and raids. I emphasize again, this is not a political post about the rights and wrongs of the Israel/Palestine issue, for which this Channel is not the place.
Hello there and sorry to see that a number of readings of books of the Odyssey on this Channel have been deleted. Is that due to Emily Wilson's publishers' copyright lawyers? She and the publishers must be doing well for revenue just now regardless of that, as according to Professor Wilson's recent tweets (or whatever we are meant to call them now that Twitter has been renamed 'X') her Iliad translation is already charging towards the top of the best seller lists, complicated only by a surprising argument with the New York Times best seller list as to whether the Iliad is fiction, and hence if it belongs in their best selling fiction chart or not (for some reason the Times do not consider it to be fiction!) Emily Wilson's Translator's Note, that appears after the Introduction to her Iliad, which I would often expect to be one of the more boring parts of a book, while only a few pages long, is one of the most amazing, fascinating, moving pieces of writing ever. As for Jonathan Shay's books relating the behaviour of Homer's heroes to modern day combat trauma, there is an interesting podcast by That's Ancient History, presented by young Scottish classicist Jean Menzies (pronounced Mingis due to strange Scottish spelling), Season 1, Episode 3, 11 June 2018, interviewing Stan Christophorou, who was researching combat trauma in Athens in the 5th Century BC, as portrayed in medical treatises and literature of the time, which he believes was influenced by the medical ideas of the period, when doctors were newly emerging as a profession. He does mention Jonathan Shay's books comparing the behaviour of Homer's heroes to modern combat veterans. Apparently there is a debate as to how far reactions to combat trauma are, as Jonathan Shay believes, universal across times and places and rooted in the fundamentals of human nature, and how far they are specific to particular cultures. I suppose fear of wounds, death and being exposed as a coward will be universal, likewise the shock of seeing your comrades die suddenly and violently, although the extent of shame at, and punishments for, cowardice in war, and the rewards for heroism, must vary across times and places On the other hand, the nature of wounds inflicted by a bronze sword will be different from those inflicted by a bullet, and the chances of being helicoptered to a field hospital and receiving science based medical care and anaesthetics if wounded, or of becoming a slave if you lose, will have been vastly different between Homer's world and the Vietnam War. Ditto the nature and strength of belief in an afterlife and in Fate, and the extent to which death of young adults is accepted as a normal fate even in peacetime. Hence Mr Christophorou (who I assume grew up in England by his accent) argues that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a creation of modern psychotherapy, and we can't project it back on to the Ancient Greeks, but that they did have combat trauma more generally.
Fantastic examples of how to enjoy and truly experience Austen. When I became interested in developing a deeper understanding of early 19th century literature having an idea of the customs/ rules/ regulations of the Regency period was a solid foundation to begin with. Jane Austen, in my opinion, was one of the finest writers in the world. To better understand I began with listening while reading. That proved to be invaluable. Here's to the best of the best, the one and only Jane Austen. ( I named my basset hound Jane Austen. We call her Austen 🐾🥰)
I LOVE hearing this! Please tell me what is helpful and what else you recommend I might add. I'm making a similar playlist for Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" right now:)
This has me thinking about how the Bennett sisters were raised, vs. the standard of the time. Lizzie's phrases "such masters as were needed," and "those who chose to be idle, certainly might," almost make it sound like 'unschooling.' And the fact that Lizzie and Mary are the only ones who play piano almost suggests that Lizzie was taking piano lessons around the time Mary realized that her role in the family was becoming "the plain one," and latched on to music as an opportunity to become "the accomplished one," instead. This also raises the question of "taste," in Austen/Regency terms, and how exactly people determined whether any given thing was tasteful or not. _Why_ were there correct and incorrect ways of admiring a landscape? Are Mary's song choices disapproved because they don't suit her vocal range, because they accompany less decorous dances, or because Irish/Scottish music was viewed as provincial?
I appreciate this reflection so much. I teach mostly privileged young men and while the Bennett sisters seem privileged to the modern reader, we know that they are one death away from homelessness. The issues of taste can also be an obstacle to my students (I mean, who REALLY cares about THIS kind of dress or THAT kind of song?) - they think that until they realize that they are no different. They too carefully choose what to wear on first dates and college interviews, they too carefully curate different spotify playlists for different purposes. Anyway, thank you again!
I appreciate having all these readings and additional commentaries. In addition to providing them, Mr Pawlyk has been kind enough to reply to some of my comments on them. I shall post a few more comments so as to record somewhere my thoughts about aspects of the Odyssey, but I am not expecting him to keep replying to them all, except if and when he wants to as I am sure he has enough to do with his day job. The 'epic simile' of the extreme grief, despair and weeping of the unfortunate conquered woman in the sack of an unidentified city beginning around 13.14 really brings home the ruthlessness of Ancient warfare, apparently just accepted in Homer's time as the way of the World that no victor was obliged to mitigate. The enemy warriors invading her town seem to see her, at this stage, in a way hard to believe in peacetime in our civilisation, but normal then, purely as human livestock, part of the loot to sell or keep as their slave ('booty of war', possibly in more than one sense, unfortunately). They can see how she is crying but have so little pity or mercy that they do not even allow her the small comfort of a minute to weep over the body of her husband who they have presumably just killed. Instead, they beat the newly widowed woman with the wooden shafts of their spears (I assume that is painful) to make her get up so they can drag her away immediately into slavery. When the Iliad or Odyssey refers, as they do multiple times, to Greek warriors sacking a city, we are normally told little about what this really means except that it is assumed that the men of the conquered city end up dead and the victorious Greeks end up with loot and women. Usually we are told very little of these women prisoners unless there is an issue over how they are to be distributed, as the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon over Briseis in the Iliad, or when in Book 9 Iliad, to try to patch up the quarrel, Agamemnon promises Achilles that in addition to other loot and benefits, when they take Troy Achilles can have 20 Trojan women of his choice, the most beautiful he can find. No one thinks they need to consider what the 20 beautiful women may feel about this. Indeed, this passage comes very shortly before, near the beginning of Book 9, Odysseus matter of factly mentions that on the way home from Troy he and his men raid and plunder the Trojan allies the Cicones' town Ismaros, 'killed the men and took their wives'. That 'took their wives' being the only reference to these women in the poem. No mention of any of them as individuals or of their reaction to, in the course of what had presumably begun for them as a normal day, being abruptly widowed and enslaved and likely herded sobbing on to the Greeks' ships, to never see their homeland or relatives again. Yet presumably the scene of the wife weeping over her slain husband's body, only to be snatched away for slavery by the victorious warriors, is repeated many times throughout the town. Was Odysseus sometimes one of the invading men in scenes just like this himself? Was it sometimes Odysseus who had been the one who had killed this woman's husband? I expect at times it was. Was he one of the men beating her to make her get up so they could carry her off into slavery? May be he was, or may be as leader he left that part to his men, but merely supervised the sharing out of captives and loot afterwards. This reminds us that Homer, Odysseus and their original audiences all knew what the consequences of War and raiding were for the losing side, and apparently accepted it as how life and fate could be. This reminds us that 'the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there'. I don't know if it is right, but I sometimes think of the Greeks of Homer's time (which I believe historians refer to as a 'Dark Age' as on roughly the same level of civilisation as the Scandinavian Vikings of the Early Middle Ages: bold, hardy, enterprising, sometimes poetic, but capable of being shockingly ruthless and seeing nothing wrong with being so.
I don't mind replying, especially to such a well thought out reflection. I agree on all counts and believe that Emily Wilson's translation deals with the issue of 'woman treated as things' more honestly than any other version of the poem. Your comments also remind me of the amazing Chris Hedges book "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning," a brilliant reflection on philosophical, historical, and psychological underpinnings of war. I forget who said it but you imply it in your reflection - Homer does not write anti-war OR pro-war poems. He writes war poems. Lastly, I think it is the brilliant psychologist Jonathan Shay in his "Odysseus in America" who reminds us that the brilliant epic simile of the woman weeping in book 13 is connected to Odysseus WHO KNEW EXACTLY WHAT THAT WOULD HAVE SOUNDED LIKE because HE had done that to woman before. Anyway, I really appreciate your close reading here!
'Homer does not write anti-war OR pro-war poems. He writes war poems.' Whoever did say that, it may well be a profound point. It is off the subject slightly, but this sort of thing reminds me of years ago when studying history at a university in England, in the last year I took a documentary special subject, based on original sources on Slavery in the Age of the American Revolution. As you may know, there were slave markets not just in Baltimore and Charleston, but in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia then. This necessarily relied heavily on books and tracts written by the early (initially, mainly Quaker) anti-slavery movement, as they were among the few people concerned with writing down descriptions of what slavery was like or debating the rights and wrongs of it. There were only a few things, not many in that period, written by slaves or ex-slaves themselves. But what was totally absent in that period (it was different later) was any explanation of the point of view of those, probably the majority of the population, who saw nothing wrong with slavery. There are occasional references in letters, diaries, sermons and other works that seem to take for granted that it was acceptable, but no clear explanation as to why they thought that. I came to the conclusion that for most people it was just that they had grown up with it, so it seemed right and natural to them, and they had never thought about it further. This made me wonder what things we all today accept without thinking about it that in a few centuries time will utterly shock people.
@@whitepanties2751 A great point. And THAT reminds me that I was lucky enough to play Rutledge in a great production of "1776: The Musical" a few years ago. My character was instrumental in keeping slavery in the union and in my song - "Molasses to Rum," I point out, among other things, a version of the hypocrisy you allude to here - albeit in a different context. Honestly, it was the most emotionally exhausting experience I have ever had on a stage (at one point my character re-enacts a slave auction and speaks in tongues in a sort of height of arousal - it was SO difficult to put myself in that place). Anyway - thank you for your thoughtfulness.
Thanks for all these videos, which must have taken a lot of time and work to complete. We haven't heard from Camille for several books. As it is a couple of years since these were recorded, which is a long time in the life of a cat, I hope she is still thriving. Best regards.
Thanks for this explanation, although I am still not sure why we really need this Anna Gnorisis character when we could just say 'moment of recognition', unless we are trying to impress people that we know big words. I thought it was harsh the way that Odysseus threatened, whether or not he actually means it, to kill Eurycleia, this old woman who has served his family for decades, if she accidentally gave his identity away. I don't know if the fierceness of Odysseus' reaction is a sign that, while trying to appear calm so as not to attract attention, he is seriously on edge, knowing how badly outnumbered he is and the danger he will be in if any of the suitors, or any of the slaves who take the side of the suitors, or are inclined to gossip indiscreetly, learn who the 'beggar' is before his plans are ready. Alternatively, it was a harsher World in those days, and whatever the length of their relationship, this is still a king talking to a slave.
I’ve read this book and the rest of Austen’s work several times. I didn’t think I needed to listen to this but I still enjoyed it. I’m a Dickens and Trollope fan as well.❤
8.35 Interesting idea that we, the audience, are almost in the position of a god, knowing what is happening even when the characters don't. Not thought of it that way before.
Hm... Not sure you're correct about several of your points... 1. "Being a gentleman was a genetic lottery, rather than a character trait or a question of one's choices." Firstly, you could become a gentleman by buying an estate and thus becoming part of the landed gentry. That's what Mr Bingley does in the last chapter and it is why his sisters are so keen on him buying an estate rather than living at netherfield for rent. Their money is "from trade" and they want to climb up the social ladder. Also, there must be an important connection to character. Elisabeth tells Mr Darcy after his first proposal that she would never have chosen him even if he had behaved "in a more gentleman-like manner". And that accusation, that he did not behave like a gentleman, is what really has him question himself and change is behaviour, as he tells her later. 2. "Marriage is only a business arrangement." I've seen several other RU-vidrs giving good sources that the regency era was the shift from hierarchical to companionate marriage. So, advice literature of the day says to choose the spouse on rational grounds - being fortune, but also suitableness of character and compatibility. I understood that the pure business thing that you describe has been questioned and softened for decades when p&p was published... 3. "Mr Bennett has entailed his estate to Mr Collins" I've been trying to find this out for several times already and still not sure, but the way you put it, it raises more questions than it answers. Mr Bennett hated Mr Collins father and does not know him, plus he has five daughters so why would he do that? Yes, I also think that he did, but why and when? Mrs Bennett chides him to "entail... away from his own daughters" so either she is purposefully stupid or she is correct. The theory I find most probable is that his father made him entail the estate before he died when Mr Bennett was young and didn't have children yet as Mr Bennetts father wanted to secure his property. Entails at the time only reached down the living generations plus one. So, the entail cannot be generations old. I think Mr Bennett either made or "refreshed" the entail in his youth and cannot reverse it now.
Thank you for this. I addressed my error regarding the entailment in my description of the video. Regarding the issue of "gentleman" and of marriage itself, I do believe that Austen's work suggests a transitional point in English culture and that her novels play on this tension. Your points are well-taken - thank you!
Great video, I’m in the middle part of reading pride and prejudice and this is such a huge help in understanding the context of the time and what it means to live in 19th century England. I got confused on reading it at first because of my unfamiliarity of Jane Austen and her formal way of writing but thank god I persisted because this is one of the best novels I ever read.
Not all soldiers, only the officers - who would have been from the gentry or higher anyway. It was not a time when a private could rise in rank beyond sergeant. Sergeant Troy in Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd, for example, set half a century after Austen's novels, was from a lower middle class background and almost married the servant Fanny Robin.
I didn't think women were allowed to say no to anyone whom they asked to court. And their mother was anxious to marry them off at 14. Not here. And money.
Totally fair. I know that old books like this one are WORK. The questions are - is this work WORTH doing? And, if so, what is the best way for me to do it? I think it's ok to watch an installment of the 1995 BBC miniseries THEN read 50 or so pages and go back and forth that way. ALSO - I REALLY recommend reading WHILE listening to the audiobook on audible. Just a few tips.
@@jaypawlyk3020 I was going to do the audiobook/reading thing but I was waiting to get beyond the holidays, when I can sit and relax. I really need some west and wewaxation. Stay well stay strong stay cool 😎😎😎.
