The Recurring Themes of Edgar Allen Poe

Essay exploring the common themes of Edgar Allen Poe by comparing The Fall of the House of Usher to many of his other popular works.

There are many thematic similarities in the works of Edgar Allen Poe. These themes are of mostly darkness and sickness and death. This is not so surprising considering his life experiences had many of the same themes. He was born in 1809 to actors. Two years later his father disappears and soon after his mother dies leaving him orphaned. He is never legally adopted but lives with the Allen family where he starts attending many different schools. First he is sent to a boarding school, then Manor House School, then enters the school of William Burke, then attends the University of Virginia where he incurs gambling debts. He asks his foster father for help, but receives none; this isn’t the first time this happens. After joining the army he asks for his foster fathers consent to withdraw but the request remains unanswered. When Poe is court-martialled and dismissed from a military academy he moves in with his aunt and his cousin Virginia. As he struggles with poverty he marries his younger cousin and has moderate success as a writer and editor. When Virginia dies Poe falls ill. He dies in 1849, after suffering hallucinations from excessive alcoholism, destitute and suffering from a brain legion. The experiences of his tragic life is the reason his stories are all so dark and foreboding with themes of eerie doublings, obsession with heads and the mind, sickly female characters, death and entombment. The story that shows of all of these themes together is Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. This one story embodies all of the common Poe themes (that can be found in his other popular works such as William Wilson, Ligeia, The Purloined Letter, Berenice, Ulalume and Annabel Lee) and gives the best representation of Poe’s unique literary world.

In the first paragraph of The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator rides up to the house of Roderick Usher. “But with a shudder even more thrilling than before” (Poe, 91) he is unnerved by the sight of the reflection of the house in the “black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling” (Poe, 91). This brings to light one of Poe’s most prominent themes in his stories and in this one in particular. Reflections, mirrors and doublings are important in analyzing any of Poe’s stories. In The Fall of the House of Usher this theme is seen in the beginning with reflection in the lake and the ending where the house crumbles down into the reflection in the lake as if it’s falling into itself; “-and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher’” (Poe, 109). Roderick Usher himself is a twin. Poe writes that “A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention… I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” (Poe, 102). And, to the experienced Poe reader, there is the possibility that the narrator is Usher himself. Perhaps the best example of Poe’s eerie twinning themes in the other stories we read in class is in his story William Wilson. Throughout the whole story it seems that this narrator is being trailed by a person who very closely resembles him.

“The feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of persona and outline of feature” (Poe, 117).

At the end of the story it becomes apparent that William Wilson the narrator was also William Wilson the tormentor the whole time. To drive this twinning theme even deeper William Wilson is confronted with the truth when he looks into a mirror; “as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait” (Poe, 130). Poe uses this theme of conversing with ones self in his poem Ulalume. The narrator writes about the experience he had one night while he was walking with his soul. “Here once, through an alley Titanic/ Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul-/Of cypress, with Psych, my Soul” (Poe, 34). Another example of the twinning or mirroring theme is in the story The Purloined Letter where there are several doublings. But the best example is when the detective says that in order to get into the mind of someone else he “fashion[s] the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or hear, as if to match or correspond with the expression” (Poe, 291). Thereby becoming the mirror image, or twin, of the person he is looking at.

Along with his obsession of doublings is his obsession with people’s heads. It often seems that Poe’s characters exist only in their heads because of the attention he pays to describing this part of the body more than any other parts. In The Fall of the House of Usher Poe goes into a detailed description of Ushers head. He describes his skin, his eyes, his lips, his nose, his chin, his hair, his brow and the expressions they all portrayed (Poe 94-95). He does all this to show how much Usher has changed from the boy he once knew. This is very reminiscent of Poe’s description of the female character Ligeia in Ligeia. He describes just her head for over a page in length. He again describes her skin, her lips, her nose, her nostrils, her chin, her hair, her forehead, her dimples, her teeth and most importantly the paragraph devoted to describing her eyes (Poe, 63-65). In his story Berenice Poe takes his head obsession to new levels. The narrator seems to be living in his imagination; he locks himself up in his library like he locks himself up in his mind. “In that chamber was I born. …-into a place of imagination- …that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie…” (Poe, 141). And like in Poe’s real life, his narrator falls in love with his cousin and becomes obsessed with her head, more specifically her teeth. He describes her head in detail as well, the same way as before; her forehead, her pale skin, her hair, her eyes, her lips and more importantly her teeth.

Another thematic similarity between Berenice and The Fall of the House of Usher is the introduction of a sickly female character. Poe has a common theme of creating a female character that is both sick and dying with a strange illness or is already dead and haunting the story. Usher’s twin sister Madeline is suffering from a disease that “had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis” (Poe, 97). Then she “succumbed… to the prostrating power of the destroyer…” (Poe, 97). In Berenice the object of the narrators desire also has a strange illness. “Disense- a fatal disease- fell like the simoom upon her frame… Alas! The destroyer came and went…” (Poe, 142). In Ligeia the narrator first wife “grew ill” (Poe, 67) and then finally dies of an undisclosed illness. Poe’s poem Annabel Lee is about a boy who is in love with a girl who has died. Ulalume is another poem about a man who has lost his love to death. Both of those poems do not mention the cause of death and if the cause of death to these young beautiful women is mentioned it is some strange and rare illness. But it is a very typical theme of Poe’s to include the deaths of young beautiful women in his stories.

It is not only the women that die in Poe’s stories but men as well. There is a major theme of death in most of his stories. In The Fall of the House of Usher not only does Ushers sister die but it is assumed that Usher dies as well when the house falls down. As I mentioned before the poems Ulalume and Annabel Lee both deal with the death of close loved ones. There is a theoretical death in William Wilson where the narrator kills the person he thinks is harassing him, which Poe describes as killing a part of himself. He ends the story with the talk of how the narrator himself is dead- “Yet, henceforward art thou also dead- dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist- and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself” (Poe, 130).

The death theme is often corroborated with his theme of entombment. Entombment plays a big roll in The Fall of the House of Usher. Usher’s sister Madeline dies and the narrator “personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment” (Poe, 102). The narrator goes on to describe in detail exactly how and where they entomb her- “The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it… was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light…” (Poe, 102). This mention of the small confined space without any light highlights just how confined and enclosed this tomb is. Then the narrator goes on to explain how they not only enclosed the sister in a tomb, they “screwed down the lid,” and “secured the door of iron” (Poe, 103). Then at the end of the story Usher is entombed by his house as it crumbles and falls down on top of him and his sister. This theme is carried over in Berenice. In the beginning the narrator describes the library in which he spent most of his childhood. “The recollection of my earliest years are connected with that chamber… Here died my mother. Herein I was born” (Poe, 141). The chamber is like likened to a tomb not only because he is constantly enclosing himself in it but also because his mother died in it. Later in the story the narrator encounters more tomb-like rooms as in The Fall of the House of Usher. For example the bed-chamber in which his cousin’s body is laying. If you take the description of the room out of context- “The room was large, and very dark, and at every step within its gloomy precincts I encountered the paraphernalia of the grave” (Poe, 146) it sounds very much like a description of a tomb. Upon entering the bed-chamber the narrator goes even further into the depths of the “tomb” when he pulls back the drapes around the coffin and lets them fall around him enclosing him in with the coffin like a tomb.

“Gently I uplifted the sable draperies of the curtains. As I let them fall they descended upon my shoulders, and shutting me thus out from the living, enclosed me in the strictest communion with the deceased. There very atmosphere was redolent of death. The peculiar smell of the coffin sickened me… I would have given worlds to escape- to breath once again the pure air of the eternal heavens” (Poe, 146).

In his poem Annabel Lee the narrator explains that his love was entombed by her family; they “shut her up in a sepulcher” (Poe, 42). And then at the end of the poem he is constantly visiting her “In the sepulcher there by the sea/ In her tomb by the sounding sea” (Poe, 43). In the other poem Ulalume the narrator unknowingly comes upon the tomb of his love.

“But [we] were stopped by the door of a tomb-
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said- ‘what is written, sweet sister,
On the door or this legended tomb?’
She replied- ‘Ulalume- Ulalume-
‘T is the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’” (Poe 16)

Poe was very true to his writing styles, motifs and themes, using the same themes in almost all his works. Doublings/mirrorings, detailing the importance of characters heads, sickly female characters, death and entombment are all important and inescapable themes of his and are all featured prominently inThe Fall of the House of Usher. Most of these themes were also important and inescapable themes of his life as well, thereby it is not a total coincidence that one can see these themes repeated through all of his writings.

Copyright Megan Tharpe 2004

You Are What You Order; The Starbucks Universe

Cultural analysis using Marxist theories for a Pop-culture class.

Comedian Lewis Black once said “the end of the universe is in Houston, Texas, where there is a Starbucks across from a Starbucks.” Is it the end of the Universe, or the beginning of a new one? The Starbucks Universe. It seems that today Starbucks are as prominent as gas stations and 7-11’s- there is one on every corner in every town. Love it or hate it, Starbucks is the king of coffee, which has become a hot commodity in this day and age (pun intended). The question is how and why Starbucks Coffee became such a pop culture icon. Perhaps one can look to Marxist theories to find the answer to this question. Several of Marx’s followers offer many interesting insightful analyses of why Starbucks is what it is; not necessarily a symbol of the end of our universe, but the symbol of our cultural universe.

The first Starbucks Coffee opened in 1971 in Seattle, Washington. The name Starbuck came from a coffee lover from the novel Moby Dick. The name of the coffee shop has become so ingrained into our culture that in the 2nd editon of the Norton Critical Edition of Melville’s novel Moby Dick there is a footnote that addressed Starbucks name that reads “In a triumph of modern marketing, the name of the ascetic Starbuck has become associated with exotic coffees and voluptuous additives, as well as baked goods that shame the nautical ‘duff’ or hardtack of Melville’s whale ships” (Parker 101). A friend of the owner designed the iconic logo— the mermaid with two tails encircled by the stores name. By 1980, Starbucks was a success in the Seattle area. In 1982, the owners named Howard Schultz, a man who foresaw the vast potential or the company, director or retail operations. The neighborhood coffee shop with modest beginnings was now on the path to reshape the way America ordered their coffee. From the Windy City to La La Land to the Big Apple, Starbucks fever was running rampant throughout the country. At present there are people who cannot even consider starting their day without a stop at their closest Starbucks on the way to work. It has become so ingrained not only in popular culture but in the day to day activities in our society that the whole concept of “getting a cup of coffee” now means “going to Starbucks.” (Cleary)

One of the first questions that comes to mind when analyzing Starbucks is; why is it so popular?

Why is it that the majority of the population would rather pay close to two dollars for a “venti” coffee at Starbucks then sixty-nine cents for a large coffee at 7-11? It could relate to the fact that purchasing one’s coffee at a prestigious café is a declaration of one’s social status, which we place a lot of emphasis on in this country. Maybe Americans figure that paying more for what is advertised as a gourmet brew is seen as a simple, inexpensive luxury. In Marx’s theory, the essential logic of class relations is one of exploitation through political and ideological domination (Burris). Starbucks has made itself the dominant name in coffee and coffee accessories. It is the most numerous of the coffee establishments thereby the most frequented. Because of the cultural domination by Starbucks it has become not only an icon but also a symbol of cultural status. You’re someone who is in the “in crowd” if you unrecognizable status if you are carrying around an unrecognizable Styrofoam cup. Starbucks is now buying out the locations of smaller cafés, just as it once was, to become the dominant and most exploitative coffee selling establishment (Cleary).

But is dominance by sheer number the only way that Starbucks got to be so recognized?

It quite possibly could be due to influence from the mass media; a Starbucks-type coffee shop was glorified in Friends, the most popular TV show for the past ten years. Friends portrayed coffee shops as trendy places to frequent and also great places to meet people, business contacts, family members, etc. This is not to say that Friends and Starbucks were working together to capitalize on the coffee shop market, but the people who benefited from both their successes were, overwhelmingly, upper-class, rich, white people (the actors and producers of the show and the owners of Starbucks’). The dominance of this one type of social group being involved in all aspects illustrates on of the basic ideas of Marxism, that cultural products “implicitly or explicitly support the interests of the dominant groups who, socially, politically, economically and culturally, benefit from the economic organization of society” (Storey, 3). In Marxism, media is also seen as an amplifier. Media institutions “act largely in tandem with the dominant institutions in society.” Media reflects and at the same time influences society. (Chandler)

Why is it that society is so ready to follow the media or each other for that matter?

From a Tall-Decaf-Non-Fat-Latte to a Grande-Caramel-Macchiato, at Starbucks one can place orders for beverages as individual as their tastes are. People can get a sense of being an individual while at the same time be an active participant in the latest cultural fad. Theodor Adorno would argue that the reason a place like Starbucks becomes popular is because of that false sense of individualism. His argument is that culture industry standardizes everything and then gets people to purchase products under the false assumption that they are individual or original (Story, 3). If we feel like we are being treated like an individual that means we will feel special and then want to come back to keep getting that feeling of being different than other people, however false that sense might be.

Has Starbucks been so ingrained in popular culture that it has become part of our identities?

After placing ones order with the Starbucks employee behind the counter the next step is to wait until the “barista” calls out “Grande Mocha!” or “Soy-Milk-Chai-Latte!” Upon hearing one’s order the Grande Mocha Man or the Soy-Milk-Chai-Latte Woman steps up to the bar and receives their coffee. This is a prime example of Louis Althusser’s original concept of interpellation, otherwise known as hailing. He argued that “ideological state apparatuses” (Storey, 102) hailed persons into certain positions. It is mostly used for things such as class or race. In this case it works mostly to hail someone as a particular class, the class identity of a person who is willing to pay two dollars for a cup of coffee. But it is also a way of associating a person in the position of a Starbucks customer. You are what you order. You are no longer a person or a name, you are a coffee, and not just any coffee, you are a Starbucks brewed coffee.

In the Starbucks Universe there are no small people, only tall. There is no such thing as medium coffee, but there are “grande drips” which use both Italian and French descriptors. You can express yourself through the way you like your morning, afternoon, or late evening coffee. You can feel like an individual surrounded by people searching for the same feeling. Starbucks has dominated the coffee shop scene for many years now, it has become a national phenomenon. It has created a, seemingly, universal need for its product. Karl Marx and his followers over the years have given us many theories to help us analyze and figure out why, exactly, Starbucks has become such a pop culture icon. There is not just one reason this has happened, there are several, all working together to influence culture. Its vast popularity is partly due to the fact that Starbucks has integrated itself with the representation of high cultural status. It also has been helped by the mass media representations of name brand coffee establishments as being a “cool” place to frequent. Starbucks illustrates Adorno’s idea that people are searching for originality and that is why they are drawn to the idea of Starbucks-- because it gives them a place to feel different because of their “made to your tastes” orders. Lastly it demonstrates how Starbucks has integrated itself into our culture by Althusser’s concept of interpellation. We have become what we order at Starbucks. In the Starbucks Universe I am a Grande-Non-Fat-No-Foam-Latte.


Works Cited

Black, Lewis. “The End of the Universe.” Audio cd. Stand up Records, 07 01 02.
Burrie, Val. 1987. The Neo-Marxist Synthesis of Marx and Weber on Class. http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~vburris/soc617/ marxweb.htm
Chandler, Daniel. “Marxist Media Theory.” 4 10 02. www. aber.ac.uk/media/documents/marxism/marxism05.html
Cleary, Ellen. “Starbucks Case Study.” 1999. www.mhhe.com/ business/management/thompson/11e/case/starbucks.html
Parker, Hershel, ed. Moby Dick. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.
Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Cutlure. 3rd ed. Prentice Hall, 2001.

Copyright Megan Tharpe 2004

Uncovering Bontecou's Mysteries

Evaluation of essays about a Lee Bontecou's exhibit



“There are so many holes.” I overheard one very observant old lady say to her friend, who nodded in agreement; both not quite sure what to make of them. Those empty gaping spaces seemed to be creating ones in our minds, begging to be explained. Holes filled with mysteries… why are they here?... What do they mean?... And most importantly… Who created these pieces?

Though the exhibit was a collection of the life’s work of Lee Bontecou, by the time I reached the end, I had even more questions about the artist than I did when I started. I didn’t feel satisfied until I read an essay by A.T. Smith entitled All Freedom in Every Sense. This particular essay is one of five essays in the book Lee Bontecou A Retrospective and, in my opinion, the most effective essay in conveying the histories and influences behind Bontecou’s work.

Smith’s essay does a very good job in detailing Bontecou’s background; her family, her schooling and the progress of her art. It made sense of her different use of mediums with sculpture and drawing. For example how she discovered that the blowtorch she used dispersed soot on the paper, thereby explaining how she came to create Plates Six, Seven and Eight at the same time she was creating sculptures. Smith also helps the reader to better comprehend Bontecou’s work by adding quotes and opinions already expressed by other writers and artists like poet Tony Towle, artist Eva Hesse and critic Donald Judd.

In fact many of the critics drew from ideas that had been previously expressed by Donald Judd. His essay, Lee Bontecou, seems to be considered the most comprehensive by the other writers. In his essay Seek and Hide, Robert Storr writes; “Greatest honor goes to Judd, since it was he, starting in 1960, who most enthusiastically supported Bontecou’s work… and it was he who most deeply and clearly understood its formal and poetic significance.” Where Smith’s essay was good for understanding the facts and the background behind the artist, Judd’s essay is a tool to help one analyze the meanings behind the artists’ works. Judd seems to glaze over her history and focus more on describing her work and what the pieces might suggest. One can see this in one of my favorite quotes of his that was also borrowed by Smith in her essay; “The image extends from something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other.”

Where most of the writers drew on quotes from other writers one writer, Mona Hadler in her essay Lee Bontecou’s Worldscapes, draws on quotes from the artist herself. This is the strength of her essay. Instead of blanketing her essay with analyses of her own, she uses things that Bontecou has said about her own work and the work of others to illustrate the ideas behind the art. She gives Bontecou’s own opinions on her use of the color black and how she was influenced by science, more importantly the launch of Sputnik. Where Judd and Storr do their best to analyze Bontecou’s work based on their perceptions, Hadler’s essay does a great job of bringing to light the actual objects and experiences that influenced Bontecou’s works. She uses what Bontecou has already said and admitted about her work to draw her opinions, thereby giving the reader a deeper understanding of Bontecou’s works by giving us a chance to see into the artists thought processes.

The most effective essay though as an art history essay is Inner and Outer Space, Bontecou’s Sculpture through Drawing by Donna De Salvo, because it is a more focused essay. It focuses on an aspect of her work instead of all of her works and the artist as a whole. Its placement in the book as the last essay was a well planned one. After reading the rest of the essays one has a better understanding of the artist and is ready to get into more depth and analysis of certain aspects of her art. De Salvo uses direct quotes from the artist throughout the essay, helping the reader to understand the ideas behind the particular works being analyzed.

There is an absence of direct quotes from Bontecou in Robert Storr’s essay and I think it is because of these feeling of being removed from the artist herself that moved Bontecou to write a rebuttal to his ideas. What I enjoyed about Hadlers essay was the close interplay of thoughts from the author and thoughts from the critique. It makes it so the reader could form their own opinions as well based on what Bontecou has said herself as opposed to what a critique has come up with on their own devises. It is so important to the evaluation of art to stay close to the ideas expressed by the artist. More important than what the audience sees or devises from viewing the art, is what the artist is trying to say, what the artist believes they are portraying. An artist doesn’t create to be evaluated or judged, an artist creates because they feel the need to express themselves. Art is very self-centered. An artist’s self-perception of their work and themselves does outweigh any opinions the public might gather from just seeing a work. No one is as close to the art as the artist is.

But the art is out there for the public to see, analyze, critique and formulate their own opinions of. And the connection between artist, artwork and audience is a special one and not to be discarded or overlooked. There is, undeniably, something magical about standing in front of a piece that was given life by an artist and experiencing this creation with a total stranger who just had one comment; “There are so many holes.” This was not negative or positive, this was not a comparison or a critique, this was a statement, and a way to understand what we were seeing, what we were experiencing together because of a person who had to express themselves in an effort to uncover life’s mysteries.



Copyright Megan Tharpe 2003

Impressions of an Impressionist Paiting

An essay on Mary Cassatt's painting A Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child which can currently be found in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.



Mary Cassatt was one of the few female Impressionist painters. Although she was an American she moved to Paris after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and lived there for the duration of her life. While there, she met Degas who invited her to submit her work in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879.1 Mary Cassatt’s body of work consists primarily of paintings of women in domestic and social settings. She had always exhibited an interest in painting scenes of mothers and their children. But it wasn’t until 1880 when her brother, Alexander, arrived in Paris with his young family that she was provided the opportunity to study and paint children from life.3 One of Cassat’s earliest work on the theme of mother and child, is entitled Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child (1880). In this particular painting Mary Cassatt is not only able to capture an exact moment in time in doing this it becomes an image that has great significance to her body of work.

Impressionists were a closely-knit group of artists that “stressed the need for recording momentary sensations on the canvas and the importance of spontaneity.”4 They thought it important to record how the eye really sees, by sometimes depicting figures cut off or caught in spontaneous movement. Their brush marks were used as a way to not only capture light but also to capture the constant motion of all life.4

The brush strokes of Mary Cassatt’s painting do a great job of portraying motion. The outlines of the figures are blurred and there are no contour lines, suggesting motion from both subjects. Since there are no set outlines the forms of the bodies are portrayed by the use of color and brush strokes. It seems as though it was painted in a frenzy; there are long sweeping strokes like she used in the lower portion of the mothers dress, juxtaposed with short brush strokes that she used to create the look of the wash basin and the baby. The suggestion of movement in the way the work was painted was not only a common Impressionist technique, but in the case of this particular work, it was also a way to represent the subjects of the painting. A baby perched on a mother’s lap is not going to be a stationary object, it’s going to squirm and move about and because of this it’s mother will have to move around as well in order to keep control of her child.

For the Impressionists it was just as important to capture the lighting of a moment as it was to capture the movement. The painting utilized pastels, creating a very bright image. The mothers dress seems to glow white in the light, while the child’s face is illuminated, almost as bright as his light blonde hair. Pastels seemed the right choice for this kind of image because they are colors that pick up the light and make the image brighter and this is an image of intimacy and sweetness. The combination of the loose brushwork and the pastel colors are very representative of the Impressionist movement.

Mary Cassatt has done and excellent job in this painting of capturing an exact moment in time. The momentarines of the image is best represented by the position of the child’s left foot. It’s turned inwards in a very awkward manner. It is not positioned in a way to suggest a child was posing for the picture. This suggests that, as mentioned before, the child was squirming and, in the moment Cassatt was trying to capture, his foot was turned in an odd angle. Also, as mentioned before, Impressionist painters thought it important to represent a moment just as a person would view it from their own eyes. They would sometimes cut off some parts of their subjects by leaving it off of the canvas. Cassatt has cropped the woman’s elbow with the edge of the canvas’s frame and cut off her legs and a part of her knee. The painting is more similar to how the eye would see it. Rarely do people view the entire image, rather they focus in on a particular sights. Cassatt has put a lot of thought into how she frames her subjects. “Proximity and compression are also characteristic of the works of Cassatt.”4 There is a reason that she has painted her subjects up close. In Pollock’s article she describes another one of Cassatt’s images, Young Woman in Black: Portrait of Mrs. Gardener Cassatt (1883) but her description also holds true to this painting as well; “the viewer is forced into a confrontation or conversation with the painted figure while dominance and familiarity are denied by the device of the averted head of concentration on an activity by the depicted personage.”2 In other words, it forces the viewer to become even more intimate with an already intimate image.

The theme of the image is supported by form and content. It is a picture about mothering and nurturing and its supported by many circular forms. The mother’s head is circular topped with a rounded bun, the child is one large plump circle, the mother’s extended hand leads the eye to the circular bowl where her fingers curl in it to form yet another circular shape. It is representative of the female form, swelling breasts and round stomach when baring a child, and most importantly reminiscent of the womb. All of these suggested forms support the theme of the painting- mother and child.

The only thing that makes this painting different from the typical Impressionist paintings is that it takes place indoors as opposed to the prevalent outdoor scenes. Positioned next to Cassatt’s painting in the same room, was a painting by Gari Melchers entitled Writing (1905-9). It is a depiction of a woman sitting down at her desk to write a letter. It too is an image of a female in a domestic space involved in an intimate activity. The museum was probably trying to show a dialogue between the two images about the theme of women in domestic spaces instead of the general theme of Impressionist paintings. Melcher’s painting called to mind Vermeer’s paintings of women with letters. (For example, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter c. 1662-1665.) These images can both be compared with Cassatt’s as well. Both Melcher and Vermeer paint a female figure in a domestic setting and although they are alone, the idea of a male figure is also present through the letter the women hold. Cassatt’s mother is participating in a very intimate feminine activity but the idea of a male figure in her life is still present by her child, which could not be conceived without a male.



Though Cassatt’s painting is similar to Vermeer’s paintings in theme, it is very different in content. Where Vermeer’s work is dark and although it seems that the viewer is a voyeur witnessing an intimate moment of femininity, the colors, movement and framing of the images are quite different. Cassatt’s painting is Impressionist so the image is comprised of pastels and bright lighting. The subjects look as if they are moving around, and in Vermeer’s it looks as though the women could have been posing for the painter.

Mary Cassatt’s use of vibrant color, bright light, loose brush strokes and theme all came together to produce a great example of Impressionist art. As an example of Cassatt’s earlier work, this painting is a great representation of Impressionism and is a great starting point for her many paintings of the mother and child theme.

1. Stokstad, Marilyn. Art History. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 2002
2. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 1988.
3. “Mary Cassatt; The First Lady of Impressionism” WetCanvas.com 25 Mar. 2003
www.wetcanvas.com/museum/artists/c/mary_cassatt/mother.html
4. “Impressionism (1870s – 1890s)” Humanities Web 25 Mar. 2003 www.humanitiesweb.org/cgi-bin/human.cgi?s=g&p=i&a=d&ID=12
5. Mary Cassatt. Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child. 1880. Oil on Canvas, 62x8x14
6. Johannes Vermeer. Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. 1662-1665. Oil on Canvas, 18 1/4x15 3/8 in.

Raising Status Through Self-Portraits

Short essay comparing Artemisia Gentileschi’s La Pittura (1630) and Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

In Mary Garrard’s essay Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting she writes about the class status of an artist, particularly a painter, during the Renaissance rivaled that of a laborer “by the association with manual arts” (Garrard, 101). Garrard goes on to explain how Gentileschi’s painting entitled Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting or La Pittura is a “sophisticated commentary upon a central philosophical issue of later Renaissance art theory, indicating an identification with her profession on a plane of greater self-awareness, intellectually and culturally, then has previously been acknowledged” (97). Another work that attempts to make this same statement is that of Diego Velazquez entitled Las Meninas. Both Gentileschi and Velazquez’s works strive to raise the class status of artists.

In La Pittura Gentileschi paints a self-portrait, one that represents her as the “allegory of painting” itself. By doing so she is representing herself as much more than just a painter, she has become more than just a mortal human being! She also shows herself as an artist at work, but she “working” in a beautiful gown, with a gold locket. These are clothes that an upper-class person would wear, not a low-class laborer on while they’re “on the job.” This suggests that she, as an artist and while being an artist (in the process of using her hands) is most decidedly upper class.


In Velazquez’s work he is conveying that very same concept of the artist as “upper-class.” Like Gentileschi, he has painted himself into his work, but he has placed himself in a court scene, surrounded by expensive and upper-class objects and people. He even puts the King and the Queen (their reflections are in the mirror behind him) into the very same painting in which he has put himself! This is an obvious allusion to his status as upper class.


While the two works seek to raise their audiences’ opinions on artists they differ in how they want their audiences to see them personally. Gentileschi wants to be thought of as a great and skilled painter who deserves respect. Velazquez seems to want to be seen as a man of great importance, who is right at home in the company of kings and queens.

Whatever the deeper meanings behind the paintings, the messages are still the same. Not all people that work with their hands are of low-class stature. Both Gentileschi and Velazquez strive to raise their status through self-portraiture in their artwork.

Copyright Megan Tharpe 2003

The Sistine Differences

A small paper on the differences between Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and altar.

It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling and five years to paint its altar. Between those two jobs he took a twenty-eight year break. It is because of this break that the two works, the ceiling and the Last Judgment look as if two different artists completed them.

Michelangelo started the ceiling in 1508. His idea was to paint scenes from the Bible in the order of how they are told. Beginning with God Separating Light from Darkness to the Drunkenness of Noah. Michelangelo’s painting techniques stayed fairly similar. In general the ceiling looks as if he could have finished it in a week. All the scenes, though some painted four years apart, are painted in the same style that Florentine humanism inspired in Michelangelo. These painted bodies followed in the tradition of Michelangelo’s sculpture of David (sculpted from 1500 to 1504) which was possibly inspired by the classical statue of the Apollo Belvedere. this means that the male nudes are beautiful, heroic, realistic representations of the male body.

And as a whole the Sistine ceiling has a very orderly feel to it. All the different scenes are framed by “illusionistic marble architecture” (Stockstad 696) that separates all the stories from each other.


When Michelangelo returned to paint the altar it was after a period of many violent political and religious events, including the Protestant Reformation. The earlier idea of united one big church under Catholic order fell apart. Devotions to saints and religious images were destroyed and, in Northern Europe, entire churches were white washed by vandals. Because of this, the very authority of art was called into question. As an artist Michelangelo was very affected by this idea, and the altar reflects the change which took place within his own work as a response.


While the stories on the ceiling are mostly uplifting images, the story and the images on the altar are mostly of tragedy, despair and pain. Where those differences are best represented are in the ways Michelangelo depicted the human body. The bodies on the ceiling follow the idea of heroic male bodes that look beautiful, virile and virtuous, the ones behind the alter do not. They resemble the male nude body in the ancient statue of the Laocoon that was discovered a couple of years before Michelangelo started work on the ceiling. (He would have, in all likelihood, had knowledge of this statue as it was in the Vatican collection of Julius II.) These types of nude male figures look as if they are on steroids. They are bulky, the muscles look harder and over-defined, a more idealized version of the male body. Because of the pain that most of the men are feeling their bodies are in poses that look distorted, in order to outwardly represent their inner turmoil.

detail from altar detail from ceiling

The images on the ceiling had a feeling of order and containment with the frames around each other; Michelangelo does away with the frames on the alter, thus creating a chaotic mass of bodies against bodies. On the ceiling the bodies had a very normal relation to space and to each other, Michelangelo ignores that on the altar because the bodies are supposed to be falling through space and for that reason there, logically, is not really a “normal” way for the human body to conform or react.

Michelangelo was responding to the frustrations and disenchantment of the people of the Catholic Church in a period of upheaval. His altar mirrored the Laocoon that became the violent substitute for the Apollo Belvedere as a representation of the mid-century struggle of human beings in response to their own deaths by the outside forces with wars, revolts and reformations. With all these social changes it is no wonder that Michelangelo’s two works would look so different. An artist’s work is very influenced by the world around him and his responses to it.

Copyright 2003 Megan Tharpe

The Pardoners' Pardon

An essay exploring the the Pardoner's Tale in Geoffery Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

A church member can confess his sins to a Pardoner, but to whom can a Pardoner confess his sins? The character of “the Pardoner” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales uses one of his favorite sermons as his tale in their story telling contest. Although it does not fulfill the rules of “sentence” (moral) and “solas” (entertaining) very well, there is a deeper reason as to why he chooses this particular sermon to tell. The Pardoner uses his tale as a means of confession, and by this “confession,” he eases his guilty conscience. There are three moments in the Pardoners tale where he bares his soul and gives evidence of the guilt he feels because of his sins.

The first is evident when, before he even begins to tell his tale, he is already confessing all his sins and his dark secrets to his company. When he begins his prologue it seems as though he is just giving an explanation of the theme of his story, “Radiz malorum est Cupiditas” (PT, 21), avarice (the love of money) is the root of all evil. But right away he delves into details about his misgivings and all the trickery he uses with his parishioners. He starts his prologue by telling his companions of all the “relics… as wenen they echoon” (as the parishioners all suppose) (36) that he has in his possession to show people, telling them of how they can cure their sins and horrible afflictions. By getting people to believe in and to pay for these “relics” he obtains lots of money. “By this guade have I wonne, yeer by yeer, / an hundred mark sith I was Parodner” (76-77).

He shows his guilty conscience for the second time when he begins to resort to making up excuses for his actions although no one had challenged him. In his prologue he confesses his sin of greediness when he informs everyone that the only reason he preaches about the sin of avarice (or greed) is so that he can gleam money from all his parishioners as apposed to clearing them of their sins.

“Of averyce and of swich cursedness
Is al my preching, for to make hem free
To yeve her pens, and namely unto me;
For my entente is nat but for to winne,
And no thing for correccioun of sinne” (87-91).

After he makes this comment the audience sees, for the first time, the Pardoner making up excuses to relieve some of the guilt he feels. He tells his audience, although it is more for his benefit than theirs, that many a sermon proceeds from an evil intention, and not only out of evil intentions but for other Pardoners it may be an intent to flatter, to gain advancement, vanity or even out of hatred;

“For certes, many a predicacioun
Comth ofte tyme of yvel entencioun:
Som for plesaunce of folk and flaterye,
To been avaunced by ypocrisye
And som for veyne glorie, and some for hate” (94-98).

In this quote he is telling himself that he shouldn’t feel so bad because lots of other Pardoners have given sermons for reasons that were just as bad as his. He makes an excuse for himself again at the end of the prologue. He confesses to his company that the reason he gives this, and all his other sermons like it, is because he is guilty of being avarice himself; “Thus I can preche agayne that samw vyce / Which that I use, and that is avarice” (114-115). And directly after he admits his sin he, as if he is trying to make himself feel better, says that even though he is guilty of that sin he can still make other people cleansed of it; “But, though myself be guilty in that sinne, / Yet can I maken other folk to twinne / From avarice, and sore to repente” (116-118). His justification there is that even though he may continue to be guilty of this sin he makes up for it by purging others of their sin of avarice. These excuses he gives after admitting to his horrible actions show the inner turmoil he feels, as a result of his guilty feelings, rising to the surface and being communicated and therefore purged.

The third insight the Pardoner gives us into his guilty conscience shows up in his actual tale. There is a character in his tale of an old man who is all wrapped up except for his face. This old man gives both advice and location of where the three main characters can find what it is that they seek, ultimately leading to the main characters getting their penance for their sins of avarice. Arguably the old man character serves as a representation of the pardoner himself. They both offer advice to wayward and often lost people. The Pardoner especially deals with people suffering from the sins of avarice and, just as the old man did for the three men, the Pardoner gives them their due penance. There is a line in his prologue where he states that sometimes he includes one of his parishioners, who has committed whatever sin he is speaking of, in his sermon. And though he may not use that persons name, the rest of the parish knows who he is referring too; “For, though I telle nought his proper name, / Men shal wel knowe that it is the same / By signes and othere circumstances” (104-106). So if he uses this tactic in his sermon, why wouldn’t he then use it in his story? And since it is a story about his sin of choice he is the perfect person to use as an example in this particular sermon. The pardoner must be feeling very tormented if he chose to represent himself as an old miserable figure who is doomed to walk to earth like a “resteless caityf” (restless prisoner) (415). By this he is showing how he feels like a prisoner of his guilt for sin of avarice. The old man in the story says that he will forever be an old man because he can’t find anyone anywhere that would trade their youth for his age;

“For I ne can nat finde
A man, though that I walked into Inde,
Neither in citee nor in no village,
That wolde chaunge his youthe for myn age;
And therefore moot I han myb age stille,
As longe time as it is Goddes wille” (408-413).

This is symbolic of the fact that he feels no one else can take away this guilt that he feels inside. So the Pardoner is forced to carry it with him no matter where his travels might take him. The last line of the quote says he must carry it for as long as it is God’s will. This represents his feelings that this guilty conscience is God’s own punishment for his sins, and it is his burden to bear until God lifts it from him, if he ever does.

Since it seems that God has not decided to lift his burden as of yet, the Pardoner uses the tale telling forum as a way to alleviate some of his guilt. As he tells his prologue the audience can sense the Pardoner struggling with his feelings in an effort to try and both exorcize his daemons (namely his guilt) by confessing his evil doings to his comrades. By doing so he must feel the relief most of his parishioners feel when they are confessing and obtaining pardons from him. This serves to, although momentarily, clear his conscience of the guilt he carries around with him daily. It becomes apparent that the Pardoner is trying to quell his guilty feeling when he begins to make excuses immediately after admitting his character flaws. He comes up with excuses although no one in his company has challenged his character. And just to force himself to repent for his sins even more he puts himself in the place reserved for the ‘sinning parishioner” of his choice in one of his own sermons. He does not name the old man, but by characteristics and certain signs it becomes painfully clear that he is projecting his guilty feelings thorough the sufferings of the old man in his story.

If it seems out of character for a person who is both a liar and a cheat to admit publicly his cheating ways to a whole group of people, it is. One would have to be of less than average intelligence to give up the secrets that have made one quite successful. Unless, of course, that person can gain something by doing so. The Pardoner is one such person who is gaining something by “showing his hand” so to speak. The Pardoner gains relief from the burden of his guilty conscience. For a moment he can step away from his role of the old man who is doomed to walk the earth as decrepit and miserable, by preaching to an audience of impartial persons who will more likely never come into contact with him again. Although his relief is temporary, it is the only way that a person in a Pardoners position, who is often as sinful as the person he pardons, can gain any pardons himself.

Copyright 2002 Megan Tharpe