Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons

For my outside reading I have been working on Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons.  This novel is an extremely depressing yet eye-opening look at an abusive family through a child’s eyes.  The naïvety of the child Ellen is what makes this novel all the more heart-wrenching.  She believes her mother has “romantic fever” rather than “rheumatic fever” and therefore believes her mother will be completely fine once she gets over this “romantic fever,” however this is not the case.  Her mother over-doses on pills in front of the drunk, good-for-nothing father and begins to pass out.  Ellen shows extreme maturity here when she tells her mother that in order to get better she must throw up the pills; her dad, on the other hand, tells Ellen that the pills the mother took are not bad pills.  He convinces Ellen that the mother simply needs to lay down on the bed for a little while and then she will be better.  That night Ellen cuddles up to her mother and feels her mother’s last heart beat. She solemnly states, “My heart can be the one that beats.  And hers has stopped.”  Ellen realizes that if it was not for her father, her mother would have stayed alive and then states, “Damn him to the bottom of Hell.”  This remark is not one to typically be spoken by a young girl, however the novel does state that she hates her father since the opening line is: “When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”  Though thoughts like this never cross a normal child’s mind, since it is usually filled with thoughts of playing with friends and eating sweets, she cannot exactly be defined as a “normal” child.  After her mother dies, she takes the role of the mother and the daughter by buying Christmas presents for herself and wrapping them the night before.  She then proceeds to hide them and finds them in the morning with a look of shock on her face as if it were a surprise.  She flat out admits that she knows Santa Claus is not real, but the child inside her wants to keep that part of her childhood alive.  Just because Ellen is forced into adulthood, it does not necessarily mean she is ready for it.  In fact, she still enjoys acting as a child when she is not in her father’s house of horrors.  She goes horseback riding with her new friend Starletta who is young than her, but she is a friend nonetheless.  So far this book’s mood has seemed ever changing, which is quite confusing since it is about a young girl living a terrible life.  The novel will switch from sadness during the mother’s death to disbelief when the mothers death “finally shut [the father] up” to happiness when she is contemplating what to do with her day whether it be horseback riding or eating whatever her “new mama” is making in the kitchen.  This book has been quite an emotional roller coaster so far, but it has got me hooked and now I cannot put it down.

"If" in Hamlet

I understand that in literature, speaking in terms of “if” is, for the most part, forbidden.  By “if” I mean that writing if something had happened, then something else would have happened is not taken too fondly in literature.  However, I feel as if I need to address the “if” factor in Hamlet because I feel as if the play can change with whatever interpretation it has.  First off, when Gertrude, Polonius and Claudius are discussing Hamlet’s mental state, Hamlet walks in reading a book.  If he had overheard the three of them talking about him, this could give him a moral boost since he would understand that they are all buying into his facade of a crazy man.  This leads to the next “if” in the play.  If Hamlet is truly acting crazy, then what is the reason for this madness?  He could be going insane over the fact that he just spoke to his father’s ghost or the realization that his father was murdered by the man who is now his mother’s wife.  Yes, this could lead a man to go insane, but he still comes out with smart and witty retorts when speaking to Polonius, thus making him look smarter than Polonius.  If a man was going insane, I doubt he would have the time, or mental ability for that matter, to come up with such smart responses; this leads into the next “if.”  If Hamlet is actually acting rather than being crazy (or “seeming” rather than “ising”), then why is he doing this?  What is the purpose of his facade?  His smart, witty comments could now be seem as him trying to confuse Polonius rather than simply trying to outsmart him.  Another “if” that has been playing on my mind is the case of Ophelia and her possible pregnancy.  If Ophelia is portrayed as a less-than-innocent character, she could possibly be pregnant with Hamlet’s child since her father has ow banned her from seeing Hamlet.  This could be due to the fact that the father knows about the pregnancy, yet Hamlet seems to know absolutely nothing about any of this, so this could be a possible reason as to why Ophelia can no longer see Hamlet in fear that he would not have a kind reaction to Hamlet.  However, if Ophelia is an innocent girl after all, she could be as utterly confused as she seems in the play.  If Ophelia has not been having relations with Hamlet, then her father could be pulling her away from him for fear that she would look bad in the public eye since he is rapidly going insane, which could tarnish her reputation.  However, Ophelia has not seen Hamlet between the time that he begins to go insane and the time that her father has banned her from Hamlet, so she could not know what is happening with Hamlet and why she is now banned from seeing him.  She could either be a naïve girl or a mischievous one.

Doubting Thomas

My allusion presentation of this week is Doubting Thomas.  This story centers around a man who refuses to believe in the second coming of Christ and continues his disbelief until he is greeted by Christ eight days later.  The nickname “Doubting Thomas” is meant to describe either a pessimist or a person who will not believe in something until they are actually shown that it is real.  I thought about this allusion for a while and realized that many stories do actually have a Doubting Thomas in them.  Most horror movies that I have seen have the tough jock in it (who is usually killed first, by the way) who refuses to believe in whatever mysterious evil being there is; this character will often say that he is not scared and try to confront the antagonistic creature in order to show everyone else that it is not real.  However, since it is a horror movie, the being is always real and the jock who provoked it is most often than not killed.  There are many other movie genres that include a character like this, too.  For example, in the comedy Warm Bodies, a zombie falls in love with a girl, who soon realizes that with her love she is changing hims back into a human; the father of the girl refuses to believe this since his wife was killed by a zombie when the apocalypse first happened.  The father only changes his belief when (SPOILER ALERT) the zombie is shot and begins to bleed.  This scene is of great importance since a major trait in zombies is that they do not bleed, meaning that the zombie has now turned into a human.  The father finally decides that zombies can change and decides to fight on their side during the apocalypse rather than fight against them.  The father could easily be classified as a Doubting Thomas not only for the reason that he would not believe in the transformation of zombies to humans, but also because he did not have any trust or faith in his daughter’s words; he had to shoot the zombie in order to believe in the transformation, rather than simply believe that his daughter was telling the truth.  Part of being a Doubting Thomas is having no trust in others and only having trust in what is seen rather than what is believed.  This actually makes me wonder whether I am a Doubting Thomas or not.  After all, I do not believe when people tell me outlandish things in order to stay away from having “gullible” tattooed across my forehead, yet I do believe in that which cannot be seen such as God and even paranormal entities.  Now I’m not saying I believe in spooky ghosts who float around the world in order to haunt people, but I do believe in life after death, though I cannot see it.  After researching this allusion, I am now questioning myself: am I a Doubting Thomas?