To Shock or Not to Shock?

Reading M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang would have been a completely different experience had Hwang kept Song’s true gender a secret. Letting the audience know that Song is really a man makes the audience very critical of Gallimard. Every time Song does a little something to keep Gallimard from finding out he is a man, the audience questions how Gallimard cannot see through the ruse. For example, when Song/Butterfly tells Gallimard that he/she is pregnant I wanted to know how Gallimard could have possibly believed that. In order for Butterfly to be pregnant with his baby they would have had to have sex. They clearly could not have had sex.

If the audience had not known Song was a man, there could have been a much bigger climax to the play. To reveal something like that to an audience that was not expecting it would be huge. Hwang’s choice in not doing this shows that he did not want to shock his audience, but instead make them analyze the relationship between Song and Gallimard. Instead of making the audience gasp in shock he makes the audience cringe at Gallimard’s blindness.

It is also interesting how the characters speak directly to the audience as well as to each other outside of the story. If the audience had not known about Song’s true gender, this way of storytelling would not have worked. Hwang would not have been able to use the flashback structure to the same effect had the audience not known right away that Song is a man. However, since the audience does already know what happens to Gallimard at the end, he is able to talk to them directly about it, as well as to Song about how to tell the story. It was interesting to read this interaction, but I would really like to see it performed on stage to get the full effect.

Nothing is Perfect

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” the people who are supposed to be considered “good” turn out to have some very questionable morals. Even though Mrs. Hopewell seems to think she has surrounded herself with good country people, O’Connor makes the story highly ironic by showing the faults and questionable morals in the various characters. I found O’Connor’s depiction of Mrs. Hopewell to be very interesting. He writes, “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack” (446). This sentence alone makes Mrs. Hopewell seem manipulative and stuck up. These are not usually considered to be very “good” qualities. Since the reader gets this impression of Mrs. Hopewell right away, the overall irony of the story is increased because Mrs. Hopewell is the main judge of “good country people” throughout the rest of the story.

The first people whom Mrs. Hopewell deems to be “good” are the Freemans. Mrs. Hopewell “realized that nothing is perfect and that in the Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good country people, you had better hang onto them” (446). The Freemans are probably the closest to “good country people” out of any of the characters in the story. Mrs. Freeman is quite the gossip and one of her daughters is married and pregnant at the age of fifteen, but they seem to have an overall sense of what is right and what is wrong. Mrs. Freeman especially seems to have very good intentions towards Hulga because she calls her Hulga instead of Joy which is what Mrs. Freeman thinks Hulga wants.

The biggest mistake Mrs. Hopewell makes in calling someone a “good country person” is the boy who comes to sell her a Bible. He appears to be an honest, hardworking, Christian boy, but turns out to be a lying, cheapskate with the worst intentions. Hulga sees what he is really like at the end of the story when she says, “You’re a fine Christian! You’re just like them all—say one thing and do another” (458). The contrast between how the boy treats Hulga and how Mrs. Freeman treats Hulga is the biggest indicator of what makes “good country people.”

No Longer a Twitter Virgin

I’ll be honest, I was very skeptical going into this whole twitter for class thing. My skepticism stems mainly from my anti-twitter attitude because I believe that the world does not need to know every little thing I am doing and I don’t need to know every little thing the rest of the world is doing. Having said this I did not mind using twitter in the way that we did. It was a good way to facilitate discussion when we were not all in the same physical location. It was helpful, however, to be in the same room with two other people. Having never used twitter before, I don’t think I would have been able to figure it out quickly enough if Laura and John had not been in the same room as me. Also, we carried on our own conversation during the twitter experience that was very amusing and made the whole experience that much more enjoyable.

It definitely took a little bit of time to get settled and comfortable using the fast pace of twitter. It was also somewhat difficult to keep track of the different conversations that were going on at the same time. I got confused when people responded to other people using their user name and found myself scrolling back to see what they were responding to quite frequently. This took time which caused me to fall behind in the current line of tweets and just made things a little bit challenging. Another thing I didn’t like was the fact that we couldn’t see each other. This made interpreting people’s comments more difficult because, like Jake mentioned, I could not always tell when people were being sarcastic. Also, I felt bad when I went for long stretches without typing anything. At least in class when I don’t say anything for a long time people around me can tell that I am engaged in the conversation and paying attention from the way I look.
 

Overall, it was a good experience. I definitely would not want to have class like that every day, but it was manageable. It also may have been more constructive if we had a little more direction to the conversation. This could be in the form of a list of questions to talk about that we receive beforehand or some other way that tries to keep things a little more focused.