C.S. Lewis on Misunderstanding Fantasy
“Good stories often introduce the marvelous or supernatural and nothing about Story has been so often misunderstood as this.”
On Stories—C.S. Lewis
The early decades of the last century saw the loss of credibility of fantasy literature among the academic elite who ruled it a popular genre with little to no scholarly merit. Little that had had the misfortune of being dubbed fantasy had escaped the blacklist cast upon the field. Many critics had also labeled the fantasy genre as largely cliché, full of shallow characters, and as having no value beyond being purely escapist entertainment. These generic labels, applied wholesale to fantastic literature, had pushed it off the radar until readers of Fantasy had become literary lepers, lurking in the corners of accepted literary societies.
Recent big screen blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and its sequel, The Two Towers, as well as the two Harry Potter films have restored much attention to the oft-ignored genre. Despite the commercial success of the two fantastical franchises, however, Fantasy has not regained much standing within the academia, as scholars continue to neglect contemporary fantasy literature when choosing curricula and fail to give the genre its due while unwittingly including much that is fantastic in classical literature courses. Although these classics have been accepted, they have often been held either as the exception to the rule or have not been labeled as Fantasy at all. Further, the lack of Fantasy in the curricula of colleges across the country has become so egregious as to ignore modern literary giants such as George R.R. Martin who competes e...
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...ery dissimilarities than any other story could because of its similarities. Lewis said, “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity” (On Stories 90). “By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality; we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves.”
Bibliography
Lewis, C.S. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1961.
Lewis, C.S. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper. New York. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich Publishers, 1966.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tree and Leaf. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.
Tolkien’s label “fairy-story” can be taken synonymously with fantasy literature.
Tea Cake is more fun and relaxed than the previous husbands. What’s more important however, is that he views Janie as more of an equal than either of the previous husbands. Both of Janie’s first two husbands viewed Janie almost on the same level as an object, or a piece of property. Tea Cake sees Janie more as an equal and a companion.
Janie does so by choosing her new found love with Joe of the security that Logan provides. Hurston demonstrates Janie's new found ‘independence’ by the immediate marriage of Joe and Janie. Janie mistakenly chooses the pursuit of love over her pursuit of happiness and by doing so gave her independence to Joe, a man who believes a woman is a mere object; a doll. By choosing love over her own happiness Janie silences her voice. The realization of Janie's new reality is first realized when Joe states, “...nah wife don’t know nothin’ ‘bout no speech-makin’. Ah never married her for nothin’ lak dat. She’s uh woman and her place is in de home()" Joe is undermining Janie, cutting short any chance for Janie to make herself heard. Joe continues to hide Janie away from society keeping her dependent and voiceless. As Janie matures, she continues to be submissive to her husband, “He wanted her submission and he’d keep on fighting until he felt he had it. So gradually, she pressed her teeth together and learned to hush (71).” Though Janie ‘learned to hush’, and suppress herself, Janie still urges for her voice. When the opportunity came for Janie to reclaim her voice, "But Ah ain’t goin’ outa here and Ah ain’t gointuh hush. Naw, you gointuh listen tuh me one time befo’ you die. Have yo’ way all yo’ life, trample and mash down and then die ruther than tuh let yo’self heah ‘bout
Janie Crawford was forced into a relationship with Logan Killicks unwillingly by her Grandmother, Nanny. When marrying Logan, she had to learn to love him for who he was and what he did. She never had the chance to know him before marriage. In the text, she says, "Ah'll cut de p'taters fuh yuh. When you comin' back?". (Hurston, 26) This was something that she did not enjoy doing. She had to follow his directions and do as she was told. Janie was trapped in this marriage with no self-esteem. She was dependent on Logan when it came to doing things such as chores around the house. As time passed, Logan had told her, "If Ah kin haul de wood heah and chop it fuh yuh, look lak you oughta be able tuh tote it inside.... You done been spoilt rotten." (Hurston, 25). Day after day, she would follow his directions, being so dependent on his orders; until one day, Joe Starks came into her life.
She realized that she married him only because of Nanny’s wishes, and she did not - and was never going to - love him. It was with this realization that her “first dream was dead, so she became a woman” (25) And although the “memory of Nanny was still powerful and strong”, (29) Janie left with Joe Starks. However her marriage to Jody was no better than her marriage to Logan. Jody was powerful and demanding, and although at first he seemed amazing, Jody forced Janie into a domestic lifestyle that was worse than the one that she escaped. Jody abused Janie both emotionally and physically, and belittled her to nothing more than a trophy wife. But Janie never left him. This time Janie stayed in the abusive marriage until he died, because Janie did not then know how to the tools capable of making her a sovereign person. She once again chose caution over nature, because caution was the safest option. And overtime she became less and less Janie, and less and less of her sovereign self, and eventually, “the years took all the fight out of Janie’s face. For a while she thought it was gone from her soul...she had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels” (76). During her marriage to Jody, Janie never got it right. She was trapped under Jodi’s command and because of this she never
Meyer, Michael, ed. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.
Janie's first marriage is to Logan Killicks. Logan enters the marriage with a large portion of land. However, Janie enters the marriage with practically nothing. This ends up becoming a relationship based on inequality because Logan starts to use his ownership of the land to control Janie. He tries to make her feel that she owes him for part of the land, which he is sharing with her. What begins as a relationship in which Logan struggles to make Janie happy, turns into a relationship in which Janie is expected to make Logan happy. She is often reprimanded for not doing enough work or for not working in certain areas such as the fields.
Janie’s first true exposure to a masculine character comes during her first marriage to Logan Killicks. Logan is the first grown man who Janie interacts with romantically and Janie is unaware of a man’s role in a marriage. Janie has also disconnected with Logan and is unable to
... domestic violence. When she met and married Joe, she was barely 18 and only had one or two years of experience of how she should go about fulfilling her duties as a wife. When Joe began to hit her, she was only 23 and had never been hurt in a relationship, so it shocked her to be hit by someone she was supposed to love. When she met Tea Cake, she had been married for over 20 years and, by this time, was used to keeping to herself to deal with emotional pain. She was accustomed to being hit by men, but Tea Cake’s comforting behavior and his expression of regret for hurting her prevented Janie from harboring anger towards him. This was the difference between Janie’s two relationships that ruined the first one and made the second. These factors also were the cause of the change in Janie’s mental reaction towards domestic abuse from both of the men that had hurt her.
Firchow, Peter Edgerly. "The Politics of Fantasy: The Hobbit and Fascism." The Midwest Quarterly 50.1 (2008): 15+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 14 Jan. 2014.
Pike, Gerald. “Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers.” Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Votteler. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research International Limited, 1990. 90. Print.
Janie’s three marriages were all different, each one brought her in for a different reason, and each one had something different to teach her. In summary, she married Logan because of her grandmother, Jody because she wanted to escape from Logan, and Tea Cake because they had true love. The marriages were different in that Logan treated Janie like a Slave, Joe was moulding her into what he wanted her to be, and Tea Cake just wanted to be with her. As a result, Janie learned many things from each marriage Tea Cake taught her to be herself and do what she wanted to, her marriage with Logan taught her to make changes in her life, and her marriage with Joe taught her to stand up for herself. In conclusion, her experiences in her marriages shaped her into the person she became, and were an important part of her life.
It is easy for the reader who enters the enchanted realm of Tolkien's own work to be lost in the magic of the Middle-Earth and to forbear to ask questions. Surrounded by elves, hobbits, dragons and orcs, wandering the pristine fields and woods, described with such loving care they seem almost real, it is easy to forget there is another world outside, the world in which John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, an Oxford don, lived and wrote his monumental series of fantasy novels. It is, after all, natural to want to escape humdrum reality. Literature that offers a simple pleasure of a different time, a different place has nothing to be ashamed of. Tolkien in the same essay describes "escape and consolation" as one of the chief functions of the fairy-tale by which term he understands also what we would call "literary fantasy" today. "Escape and consolation" seem to be self-evident terms. What is there to discuss? Perhaps all that I have to do today is to praise Tolkien's fertile imagination and to step modestly aside.
Her marriage to Logan Killicks initially taught her that not all marriages consist of love. Being married to Joe Starks taught her that people change and you shouldn’t suppress your feelings and Tea Cake taught her to finally love, truly and fully. Similarly to Janie, the reader takes from her experience that its better to love and lose than to never have loved at
“Short Stories." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010. 125-388. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. VALE - Mercer County Community College. 28 February 2014
+Marking a test with lots of questions about digital camera to show that what consumers¡¯ need is, what they want and what motivation cause they to own a digital camera.