Ideas of Conquest

One of the ideas brought up in class was the one of new land representing a woman and one that people wanted to plunder and take advantage of. The conquistadors told narratives of their conquests as sexual exploits. Diaz discusses the difficulty of the hunt to conquer Mexico. “It won’t be an easy conquest.”

I see Cortes as a cocky man who asserts his power over others who are powerless. He is a bully who believes he is superior to the Aztecs because he has God on his side and thinks he is saving them from damnation. His thoughts about his superiority show when the natives gather to watch him and his men “No wonder, since they had never seen horses or men like us before.” (69) “Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me. “(Napoleon Bonaparte) I think that Cortes would agree with Bonaparte. He became power hungry and even burned down his ships so that no one would be able to retreat.


When discussing the idea of conquest and females, I was reminded of a TV show that I watch call How I Met Your Mother. One of the characters spends an enormous amount of time trying to get women to sleep with him. He even has a “playbook” in which he discusses all the different types of cons he has played on women to get them to sleep with him.






This greed and lust for conquest make me think of the Berlin Conference in 1844-1845. European countries scrambled to gather up as much African land as they could, to gain new resources as well as assert their power on the natives of the land. They believed they could convert them but more importantly knew they could exploit them and their resources. Even though the African countries got their independence eventually, their cultures are still marked from the effects of the Berlin Conference.




The Corquette:
In class, the example was made between Boyer and Sanford as England and America at the beginning of the American Revolution. I thought it was a very interesting way to think about it and it really helped me to understand the characters in a new way. Sanford (America) was seen as unpredictable, the “wild one” and one with passion. Boyer (England) was seen as a safe, stable and consistent choice. He was tame and somewhat boring choice.

Someone in class brought up the idea that Stanford uses guerilla warfare as tools of seduction. They likened him to Mel Gibson in the forest scene of the Patriot, when he was covertly killing the British. He has a kind of predatory aspect to his character. He spoke of Eliza saying “If I can’t have her, no one can.”

Questions:

Why do men always think of being violent as a form of power?
What does The Corquette teach us about relationships between men and women?
Why did Eliza see marriage as a loss of freedom?




Sources:
"Conference of Berlin." The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. 3 Feb. 2011 .

Crowe, Sybil Eyre. The Berlin West African Conference, 1884-1885. London: Pub. by Longmans, Green and, 1942.

Förster, Stig, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Ronald Edward Robinson. Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: the Berlin Africa Conference 1884-1885 and the Onset of Partition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.

The Scarlet Letter and Desires

The Scarlet Letter is the story of a woman named Hester Prynne. Hester Prynne is a woman from a Puritan village in Boston. She is a woman who got pregnant while she wasn’t married and her punishment was to wear a red A on her clothing to let everyone know of her sin. Her punishment becomes a sort of sermon to the others of the village of what not to do. It also serves as a constant reminder of her sin and the time when she choose passion over what she knew she should do. Her identity becomes her sin, and she is not able to create her own identity for herself. She tries to make the A her own by embroidering it in gold thread, but she cannot really create her own identity without her punishment following her. She is seen as an example of how the devil is alive and working is the village.

Not only does she have to wear the embroidered A on her clothing, she also had to stand in the pillory for 3 hours. A pillory was made to publically embarrass people of the community. It was kind of like the stocks and held your hands and head down. There was often a placard nearby to tell of the person’s crimes. Not only did the person have to stand in front of the entire community in this wooden contraption, they were often abused while in the pillory. People would throw things including rotten food and other objects at the person stuck in the pillory. They would often get hurt in the process of being humiliated by the community.

Her punishment becomes a sort of freedom to her. Women at that time had no voice or freedom whatsoever. But Hester was able to gain power from it and do things other women at the time would not be able to do. “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.” (Chapter XVIII "A Flood of Sunshine")She travels into places that other women would never go. She was liberated by knowing that she could live beyond the law and to know that she knew the darkness that was inside others in her community.

Plato believed that desire was so strong that it could if left unchecked, enslave your other parts. Can we control these desires? I believe that we should at least try to control our desires because if we don’t, just as Plato says our desires can enslave us. Think of it like an addict, the more we feed our desires, the more we will feel the need to keep doing whatever it is that we are feeding. I think we need to try to keep all three of the parts reason, emotion and desire in balance with each other.

Hester became an outcast to others in her village because of her sin. Other women are treated the same way in some places today. In some strict Muslim cultures, women must remain pure until they are married. If for some reason, they are not, they are immediately thrown out and thought to have brought shame upon the family. The punishment is stricter for these women than Hesters, they are stoned.

There was a case in the United Arab Emirates in 2000. An Indonesian woman named Kartini binti Karim was working as a housemaid and was found to be pregnant without being married. She and an Indian man were both charged with adultery, but the man fled the country before he could be arrested. She was on trial and wasn’t given a lawyer or even able to speak the language in which the trial was being conducted. She was found guilty, and sentenced to death by stoning. The whole time the trial was going on, her embassy had not been aware of her or the trial against her. When they heard about it, they immediately stepped in, appealed and got the sentenced reduced to a year in prison. She was an outcast from that society because she chose passion over the rules of that society.







Sources:

Wheeler, Julia. "Death by Stoning Appeal." BBC News 13 Mar. 2000.

"Kartini granted clemency by UAE court." Indonesia News 25 April. 2000.

(http://www.hamline.edu/apakabar/basisdata/2000/05/08/0052.html )

Cotton Mather and On Withcraft

Cotton Mather was part of a prominent family of Salam. Village during the Witch trials. He wrote about the trials in his book On Witchcraft. His book gives valuable insight into Puritan life and their thoughts on witchcraft. The Puritan people were a very close knit community. They believed that everyone was born as children of the devil and that only God’s grace would lift them out of original sin. Mather as well as other Puritans in the town believes that Satan can assume different shapes. In addition, he believes that people can be seduced without their conscious knowledge. The only way to protect yourself according to the Puritan faith is to pray that you can be protected from the devil.

I think one of the reasons that the trials got to be so massive was the mentality of fear that the Puritans were living in. They were taught to be afraid of the wilderness and land that they were living in. They believed that it was Satan’s land and that they had to war with him in order to win it for God. So they were consistently living for when he would attack, and they saw witchery as a way for him to break the Puritans and hurt God’s work that they were doing there. So when the girls started accusing people of being witches, everyone was afraid that Satan had come to attack the village. Mass hysteria broke out at the thought of their neighbors or friends being witches. This type of hysteria reminded me of the kind of hysteria that Europeans had about the Jewish people leading up to World War II. Hitler blamed all of Germany’s problems after World War I on the Jewish people. People at the time were looking for a reason as to why they were blamed for the war, and why Germany’s economy fell so far. They believed the hysteria that Hitler told them, and began to be afraid of the Jewish people. Just as the number of accused at the trials rose, so did the people blamed for Germany's fall. Now anyone who was different than Hitler’s Aryan race (twins, mentally disabled, gay, gypsies and others) began to be targeted as well as the Jews. In both cases, the people were worried and so wound up that hysteria broke out.

I have learned about the witch trials before, but learned new things that I thought were kind of interesting. One thing is that the trials were the first time that spectral evidence was able to be used in the courts. Spectral evidence was things that were only evident to those who were affected, for example the ghosts of someone coming to haunt the girls. Another thing that I thought was interesting was that the first wave of accusations of witchcraft was people that didn’t go to church and had low stature in the community. The second wave of accused people had high status and was respected. For example, many people respected Rebecca Nurse as a pillar of the community and a good Christian woman; however she was accused in the second wave of accusations. The town was split; the western side of the community had a lower status and was farmers. The accusers lived on the Eastern side of town and were richer with more liberal views. Children as young as 4 years old were being accused in the second wave of accusations. The only sure way to live was to confess, out of the 200 people accused, 55 confessed to witchcraft. Overall, 24 people died as a result of the trials and accusations.

The Puritans may have continued the accusations as a way to provide excitement in their otherwise somewhat boring lives. They could also have continued them to become famous as the news of the trials spread all the way to England. Although these are both plausible explanations, I don’t think these were the reasons. I think they believed that it was their mission to destroy Satan and to maintain God’s work in their community. They believed they were fighting a war and that this was a necessary evil in order to continue God’s plan for Salam.

What is evil? I think that evil could be either an internal or external force. It can be an external force that works against people such as Satan and demons. I also think that some people can be inherently evil such as Charles Manson, Jeffery Dahmer and other serial killers. I don’t know what would make a person evil, whether it’s a bad home life, or abuse but I do think that some people are evil.



Questions
Were there really witches in Salam?
Did the girls make it all up, or were they really afflicted?
Is there a chemical explanation for what happened to the girls such as ergotism in the rye bread?

Source: Randall Bytwerk, Bending Spines: The Propaganda of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2004). A paperback edition is also available.