Mosquitoes

William Faulkner's Mosquitoes is a roman à   clef featuring some of the people and locations Faulkner encountered while staying in New Orleans as a young writer. This paper will examine the relationship between the upper class and the artists and the relationship between the upper class and the workers. In particular this paper will examine the actions and character of the two main characters: Mr. Gordon and Patricia Robyn, as well as a most interesting character Ernest Talliaferro.Faulkner stages much of his novel aboard a yacht so that they won't have contact with other members of society. In literature the use of isolating the characters from society is not uncommon for example Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Shakespeare's The Tempest and Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians and The Mousetrap. By separating characters from society, the author is able to focus his or her attention on the people as themselves, almost as if he or she were isolated for a laboratory experiment. Mosqui toes provides Faulkner a forum to examine the artistic life in contrast to the life of the members of the beautiful people and the workers. In particular Faulkner examines the creative growth of the artists and the lack of growth of the part of the others on the cruise (Atkinson, 8).Faulkner stocks his novel with characters representing three groups or perhaps communities of society. He represents the artists with of Dawson Fairchild, a novelist, Mr. Gordon, a sculptor, Mark Moore, a poet trying to â€Å"nurture a reputation for cleverness,† Dorothy Jameson, a painter and Eva Wiseman, a lesbian poet (Fitzgerald 39). Also included with this group is Julius Kauffman who at times serves as a narrator such as when he relates the life story of Mrs. Maurier, hostess of the cruise   or as the philosophic pathfinder for the artists' discussion throughout the book.Among the social elite are Mrs. Maurier a social dilettante who is quite wealthy and a hanger-on of artists, her twin ni ece and nephew Patricia, who is the catalyst for much of the book's action, and Josh Robyn who are visiting from Chicago, and Ernest Talliaferro who is the conduit between three classes. He is a member of the working class as a buyer of women's clothes for a local department store, he is friends or is at least known by some the artists who don't really seem to care too much about him, and visits with Mrs. Maurier who also appears to not care about him except for his ability to provide access to the artistic community.The novel is written in six major sections days 1, 2, 3, 4, a prologue where Faulkner gathers up his characters and an epilogue where he returns them to their individual places in society. The sections, Day One through Day Four take place largely Mrs. Maurier's yacht the Nausikaa. In Homer's Odyssey Nausikaa was a young woman, daughter of the king, who found Odysseus and brought him into her city to care for him. In Mosquitoes Mr. Gordon represents Odysseus and Patricia Robyn is the analogue of Nausikaa.Mr. Gordon is a sculptor. When the novel begins, Gordon has just finished a sculpture. It represents his ideal woman. It is of a young woman with small breasts who has no head, arms, or legs. Mr. Gordon has sculpted the piece from his imagination rather than using a model. At this time he has little interaction with others, artistic or otherwise.Shortly after the novel begins, Mrs. Maurier, Patricia Robyn, and Ernest Talliaferro visit Gordon's studio and see the new sculpture. The reactions of both Patricia and Gordon are plot points in the novel. When she first sees Gordon's sculpture Patricia believes she recognizes the statue as being of herself, â€Å"[i]t's like me† (Faulkner 28). Mr. Talliaferro describes it more eloquently â€Å"[d]o you see what he has caught? . . . The spirit of youth, of something fine and hard and clean in the world† (26-27). Mr. Gordon is very interested in Patricia in relationship to his sculpture. He exa mines â€Å"her with growing interest her flat breast and belly, her boy's body. . . . Sexless, yet somehow vaguely troubling. Perhaps just young, like a calf or a colt† (Faulkner, p. 26).Throughout the book there is a sexual tension between Gordon and Patricia. When they are swimming he twirls her around and throws her into the water. She is thrilled, â€Å"for an instant she stopped in midflight, . . . high above the deck while water dripping from her turned to gold . . . the last of the sun slid upon her and over her with joy† (Faulkner 72).Ultimately it is Patricia and to a less extent, Mrs. Maurier who provide the artistic growth for Mr. Gordon. Just as Nausikaa rescued Odysseus from the sea, Patricia rescues Gordon from his previous tendency to work without a model, working from his mind using ideal types that don't exist in reality. When Mr. Gordon sees her in her young, self-centered state, he realizes he must work from real life. He makes a mask of Mrs. Maurie r. This is significant because it is the first time, as far as the reader knows, that Mr. Gordon had sculpted based on a live person rather than his personal artistic ideal.His growth and change of artistic inspiration to the real world are punctuated in the Epilogue where he walks the busy night streets of New Orleans with Fairchild and Kauffman drinking and celebrating their epiphany of working within society. Gordon leaves the book when he decides to visit a bordello looking for a real woman instead of a fantasy woman (Hepburn, 21-22).Throughout the play Patricia has an androgynous quality about her. Despite her sexual appeal to Gordon and later to David West the ship steward, Patricia is always described as â€Å"hard and firm and sexless† (Faulkner 140). In many ways she seems androgynous, neither male nor female. Although she will flirt with men, kiss them and even run away with them, whenever she feels she is not in control she brings the interaction to an immediate ha lt. She is the female part of the person she and her brother make together.At times they will call each other â€Å"Gus† as if Gus were the real person and Patricia and Josh were just partial personae of Gus. She lies next to her brother for part of the night of day four because she wants to be near him. He will be leaving for Yale the next day where she not be nearer to him than living in an apartment in New Haven. While lying together she asks him â€Å"[d]idn't you do something to that boat† (Faulkner, p. 261.The yacht had gone to ground and was unable to move for three days, making certain they were uninterrupted by outsiders. This was caused when Josh removed a rod in the steering mechanism, but Josh denies it, â€Å"I never hurt—I never was down there except the morning when you came tagging down there (Faulkner, p. 261). Yet he quickly tacitly admits his guilt when he asks if Patricia has told their aunt.By the second day Patricia is bored with being a l iving ideal and looks for diversion. She decides to go swimming and coaxes David West, the steward to go with her. While swimming he is aroused by her, he â€Å"looked up at her with an utter longing, like that of a dog.† On day three they leave the ship and try to cross the swamp and get married in Mandeville. Their excursion into the swamp, struggle to find the road and the way to Mandeville with David West seems to foreshadow for Patricia what her life might be if she were to give up her place in high society and marry into the working class.She wouldn't be able to bear it. She would use up her working class husband, working him until he collapsed from exhaustion. It isn't long before Patricia treats West like an animal. She is done slumming with the working class and decides to take charge just as her social position permits. She demands, in the face of reason, that they take the direction she chooses when they arrive at the road. This seems to indicate that she realizes she has chosen the wrong way by leaving the boat, representing wealth and high society.She literally rides him into the ground as he carries her when she is too tired to walk. When they discover they have been walking the wrong direction, West collapses. Ultimately they find someone to give them a ride back to the Nausikaa, but she insists on paying with her own money. As a consequence of what David and Patricia went through together David quits his job and is gone the next morning.A curious thing is that Patricia seems to the only one troubled by mosquitoes. Almost exclusively she is the one who â€Å"angled her knee upward and outward from the knee, scratching her ankle† (Faulkner 23). It is she that â€Å"suddenly slap[s] her leg when she and West are planning to enter the swamp. It is Patricia is so badly bitten by mosquitoes that West puts his shirt over her to protect her (Faulkner 150). Of all of passengers, she is the one that is most irritated by the pesky â€Å"mo squitoes† of life.One last point about Patricia that should be made has to do with the evening when she first met Mr. Talliaferro. As Mr. Talliaferro prepares to leave Mrs. Maurier and Patricia for the evening Patricia calls him â€Å"Mr. Tavers.† This is apparently his real name and the incident shocks him. His entrails feel cold because of her statement (Faulkner 31). This writer tried on numerous occasions to find a resolution to this puzzle but was unable to do so. The nearest indication that might solve this puzzle appears in the description of Talliaferro (Faulkner 32) â€Å"[t]hey never did know what became of Mr. Talliaferro's sister.† This might indicate that Faulkner had initially intended to make some previous connection between Patricia and Talliaferro through his missing sister, but failed to do so in the final version.This event provides a segue to a most interesting character: Ernest Talliaferro. Mr. Talliaferro is a tiny man, eager to please, unwi lling to make waves, but eager to spend time with artists, particularly Dawson Fairchild. He is a buyer for the women's clothes department at a local department store. He married young, was widowed young and set about making himself over. He â€Å"did† Europe in forty-one days and cultivated friendship with artists and members of society, such as Mrs. Maurier. He lacks confidence, often apologizing and knocking into things. He is eager to date women but finds himself unable to get up the nerve.Frequently he seeks Fairchild's advice. On the second day of the cruise Fairchild tells Talliaferro that he isn't â€Å"bold enough with women . . . I don't mean with words. . . . They ain't interested in what you're going to say: they are interested in what you're going to do† (Fitzgerald 96). Sadly, but a bit amusing, Talliaferro takes this advice to heart and tries to implement it with Jenny the attractive young woman whom Patricia invited to attend. On the second day Talliafe rro finds Jenny sleeping on the deck.He tries to wake her â€Å"[w]ake princess with kiss† (Faulkner 109) this causes her to awaken but she is terribly frightened. However she does dance with him later that afternoon and things go smoothly until day four when the guests are trying to free the boat and Talliaferro is overcome with desire and grabs her and pulls her with him into the water. Naturally, Fairchild thinks this it is funny that Talliaferro has implemented his advice in such a boisterous fashion and laughs about it. Unfortunately, Talliaferro has not learned his lesson and repeats his efforts in the â€Å"Epilogue† only to be disappointed again. By the end of novel Talliaferro has retreated further into himself and seems to have no interest in a relationship with a woman.Although Faulkner never uses the â€Å"M† word in this book, it is clear by the scratching and slapping that there are both literal and figurative mosquitoes. As mentioned above, Patric ia suffers from bites from mosquitoes. Most of characters suffer from pesky, annoying irritations throughout the book. The artists are irritated by the way in which the non-artists want to parade them around on the cruise like some sort of show pony. Talliaferro is irritated due to his inability to successfully seduce women, Josh Robyn is irritated that Major Ayers does not believe that he is making the pipe for fun. Naturally Ayers is upset because he wants to market the pipe, and Robyn will not help him do so.It is in part due to the irritations that Gordon, Fairchild, and Kauffman grow. Prior to the cruise, they had lived their lives working when they could and trying to avoid the pesky little mosquitoes fostered by the non-artists. By the time the cruise has ended they have realized that these pests provide much of the motivation and interest in life. In essence, they have changed their philosophy of art from â€Å"an aesthetic ideology of formalism as part of a larger expressi on of cultural conservatism (Atkinson, 6)Unhappily, no one else appears to have changed much other than these three. Mrs. Maurier is still the social matron, though she is quite angry with the artists. Patricia Robyn has returned to the self-centered, sexless, hard person she was when she first appeared in the novel. When she says good-bye to the poet Mark Frost, she is just as cold to him as she was to Gordon when she first met his him. Mr. Talliaferro, the wonderful, Chaplinesque man, is still frustrated. He has had no success trying to seduce a woman. However Faulkner tells the reader that Talliaferro was to be married soon. Sadly, he does not appear to tell Ernest.The conclusion that Faulkner draws with this book appears to be that artists need to explore life, down and dirty. However, his apparent conclusion that non-artists will not grow is parochial and hopefully false. This smacks of the self-centered arrogance a young, gifted writer might have before he and his craft mature . Summary of â€Å"Faulkner's Mosquitoes: A Poetic Turning Point†By Kenneth Wm. HepburnHepburn's thesis in this article is that there was a turning point in Faulkner's writing that occurred not with Satoris as many scholars have alleged by with Mosquitoes published two years earlier. The author tries to establish that â€Å"the poetic which finally involves from the structural considerations of various artistic strategies is both necessarily prior . . . and central to the development of† the open-ended poetic of Faulkner's more famous novels (Hepburn 19). To prove his thesis, Hepburn focuses his study on Sections Nine and Ten of the â€Å"Epilogue† (Faulkner 277-288). In the first of these sections Hepburn contends that three of the artist, Gordon, Fairchild, and Kauffman undergo the greatest change. They are walking the streets at night through the â€Å"seedier streets† of New Orleans (Hepburn 20).   In this section each of the artists, Gordon, Fitzge rald, and Kauffman make the transformation from artists that were polarized from each other to artist are more in congruence. In this section there is a parable of three groups, priests, revelers, and rats encounter a dead begger [sic] clutching a piece of stolen bread.The priests in their â€Å"thin celibate despair† (Faulkner 277) and the revelers engage in an orgy-parade cannot be bothered with the dead begger [sic]. Only the rats can appreciate him by â€Å"dragging their hot bellies over him, exploring unreproved his private parts† (Faulkner 281). According to Hepburn the parable indicates that these three artists have changed and recognize â€Å"[o]nly the artist who is willing to wade into life will ever be able to confront it with any intimacy and accuracy† (Hepburn 23).It is evident that Hepburn has interpreted these sections correctly. What is not evident is why Hepburn views Mosquitoes as a poetic turning point. What he appears to prove is that Mosqui toes provides a needed prerequisite to his later writing. This need not signify a turning point but rather may be just one more step along the path toward becoming the writer Faulkner   would become in subsequent years. Works Cited Atkinson, Ted. â€Å"Aesthetic Ideology in Faulkner's Mosquitoes: A Cultural History. The Faulkner Journal 17, 1(2001: 3-18. Faulkner, William. Mosquitoes. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964. Hepburn, Kenneth Wm. â€Å"Faulkner's Mosquitoes: A Poetic Turning Point.† Twentieth Century Literature 17, 1 (Jan. 1971): 19-28.

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William Foxwell Albright Essay Example for Free

William Foxwell Albright Essay William Foxwell Albright was born in 1891 and died eighty years later in 1971. He was born in Chile, where his parents were missionaries. Poor eye sight as a child meant he did not often join other children in play. Instead he turned to his father’s library. The family returned to the United State of America in 1903. Always a scholar,, his skills meant that he obtained his doctorate in Semitic languages at the very early age of 22 in 1913. From 1929 – 1958 he taught at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he was the professor of Semitic Languages, while, for much of that time, also being director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, now re-named as The W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research. He held the latter post from 1921 to 29 and again from 1933-6. He was also the senior editor of the Anchor Bible series for the fifteen years from 1956 until he died in 1971 as well as making contributions to important definitive reference books such as the Cambridge University Press , ‘The Cambridge Ancient History’. According to his sentry in the New World Encyclopedia he was concerned with:- The social and political structure, the religious concepts and practices and other human activities and relationships that are found in the Bible or pertain to peoples mentioned in the Bible. Following the example of Sir William Flinders Petrie, who worked in Southern Israel from 1890 onwards, Albright was able to establish a systematic way of dating pottery found in Palestine, as when Tell Beit Mirsim , to the south west of Hebron in Jordan, was excavated in the years from 1926-36. His earliest archaeological investigations had as their focus the historicity of the Patriarchs. As late as 1961 he was able to utilize much of his knowledge on this subject , gathered over many years, in his article ‘Abram the Hebrew, a new archeological perspective. ’ In 1922 he had worked at the site of Gibeah ( Tell el ful, meaning hill of beans ) He would also work at other sites such as Beth-Zur, Bethel and Petra , the great trading city of the Nabateans, in Jordan. Although best known, and mainly concerned with biblical archeology, he was also able to make his contribution to knowledge about other near eastern subjects. He helped to establish a correct dating for Hammurabi in Babylon, when he argued with other scholars that their interpretation of a Mari letter was incorrect , His paper entitled, New Light from Egypt on the Chronology and History of Israel and Judah, was concerned with dating the Egytian pharoah Shishak, a contemporary of Soloman who began to rule at some point from 945 and 940 B. C. E. He laid the foundation of the understanding of ancient West Semitic cultures, in particular the religion of the Cananites. For all these reasons he was referred to as ‘The Great Authenticator’ because, among other things, it was he who identified, the Dead Sea Scroll as being authentic, despite his poor eye sight. In 1948, having only seen a photograph up to that point, of the scroll of Isaiah, he wrote to John C. Trevor at the at American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem in March 1948 :- I repeat that in my opinion you have made the greatest manuscript discovery of modern timescertainly the greatest biblical manuscript find What an incredible find! There were in fact some 15,000 fragments making up texts from 574 original manuscripts. The particular text concerned, a complete copy of the prophecy of Isaiah, which had been shown to Trevor by a Syrian Orthodox monk about a year after the original discovery of the scrolls, was the oldest Hebrew text discovered up to that time. Some of his work was instinctive, as when he studied a letter, believed by others to be from the Bronze Age, that is some 4,000 years ago. According to Dale Keiger he just sensed that something was wrong. Only recently has he been proved right. Keiger says of him :- The Bible, before William Foxwell Albright, was exempt from critical appraisal: It was simply Gospel. He goes on to describe how, because he could not see well enough to join in ball games, he studied from an early age. He was brought up in a Christian home and never repudiated Christian interpretations of the Bible, but he did say that it should be studied in the context of history. Albright has been described as the:- Father of biblical archaeology and the dean of American archaeologists working in the southern Levant from the 1920s through the 1960s. And he was ‘father’ in the sense that he passed on both his knowledge and enthusiasm. A number of his former students became leaders in their own right in the field of Biblical study and in archeology. Yet the same writer claims that the impact he made upon archaeological methods can be described as negligible. So was Albright as great as has been claimed? Other workers Although relatively well known because of his association with the amazing finds at Qumran in the 1940’s, Albright was in fact only one of dozens of other leaders of archeological expeditions. These began in a small way when an attempt was made in 1838 by Edward Robinson and Eli Smith to identify biblical cities, using as their basis modern day Arabic names . From the 1860’s onwards Warren began searching in Jerusalem. Albright actually used for the most part methods already established by earlier workers, rather than developing new ways of working. It was the British archeologist Kathleen Kenyon who developed the idea of stratigraphy, which involved close examination of the soil under and around objects discovered. It was her method, which was more demanding upon the excavators that was used from the 1950’s at very important sites such as Jerusalem and Jericho. It was based not upon instinct, but upon very careful analysis and interpretation of the materials found. Albright’s achievements. In Bernard Anderson’s work of 1957 ‘The Living World of the Old Testament’ the index has 17 citations under the name W. F. Albright . This gives some indication of the amount and range of his scholarly writing. For instance it is his opinion about the probable date of the Exodus that became widely accepted at the time. Much of his writing is about the translation of ancient texts. He is known for instance for his views on the history of the word YHWH which he said had it origins in God’s creative ability, a view accepted by some scholars, as Anderson describes. His scholarly writing was wide ranging, as when he described the Canaanite religion in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit. though it may be in this case that he was only restating what others such as Pritchard had discovered about such very early texts, although Anderson does quote a translation by Albright. He was prepared to argue with others when he felt that he was right as when he stood out about the dating of the Song of Deborah , and the battle of Megiddo. Also with regard to the Biblical prophecy of Habakkuk Anderson describe how many scholars see the Psalm in chapter 3 as having been inserted by different writer, whereas Albright held out for a substantially unique authorship for the whole book, basing this upon the language used. Work by Albright has been confirmed by later work, as when he evacuated King Saul’s fortress at Gibeah, in 1922-3 and found that the charismatic Israelite leader lived a very simple life, in a two story building built upon earlier foundations. His findings were confirmed by Paul Lapp who looked at the site again in 1964. He was acknowledged as an expert upon links between the Bible and archeological findings because of his many writings, as when he wrote ‘Archeology and the Religion of Israel’. Albright was able to study the group of artefacts known as the LMLK seals. He also performed many on-site excavations, the first being one of the most significant, when in 1923 he was able to excavate a tumulus situated near Jerusalem, Israel. Criticism of Albright’s work. Some recent archeologists have seemed to be trying to make a separation between the Biblical record and archeology, whereas Albright sought to prove the Bible from archeology. Archeologist William Denver has said ’Most people really think that archeology is out to prove the Bible. No archeologist thinks so. ’ He has also said of Albright that :- Central theses (regarding the historicity of the Bible) have all been overturned, partly by further advances in biblical criticism, but mostly by the continuing archaeological research of younger Americans and Israelis to whom he himself gave encouragement and momentum. Despite such statements in Albright’s case he was often able to confirm the Biblical record. It has been found by people such as Lapp that his archeology was correct. Having said that Metzer and Coogan in 1993 said that his identification of Tell Beit Mersim as Debir has been disputed. Debir was the ancient fortress of one of the kings of the Amorites who were eventually defeated by Joshua at the time of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, . Despite this the Thompson Chain Bible marks it to the south west of Hebron as Albright said. The Oxford Companion to the Bible has a similar map, so even when his findings are disputed they are accepted by at least some scholars. Albright’s were not the only person whose findings were disputed. The various different views caused much confusion in the mind of the public. In 1932 he wrote:- Small wonder that historians and Biblical scholars turned away from this chaos of conflicting views in despair, convinced that the main purpose of archaeology was to unearth inscriptions and occasionally to elucidate the arts and the crafts of the ancient inhabitants. Times have moved on in what Thomas described as ‘The Shifting Sands’ of archeology. According to William Dever, as quoted by Thomas Davis, staff needed for excavations in Bible lands would no longer ask the questions posed by the Bible and it associated archaeology, but those raised American anthropology. Conclusion Albright’s real claim to fame seems to have been not so much as a pure archeologist as in his skills in the Semitic group of languages. He was able, despite his faulty eyesight, to examine ancient texts and come to important conclusions. In some cases his findings clearly back up the literal Biblical record. It has now been almost 40 years since his death and so perhaps it is time for a reassessment of his scholarly contribution. There is ongoing work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but apparently no doubts about Albright’s original dating of the finds at between 200 BCE and 200 C. E. Archeologist Doctor Bryant Wood , one of the Associates for Biblical Research, has described the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are important because they are roughly 1000 years older than the previously known texts with which they can be compared. This means that they show how the Old Testament scriptures have been faithfully copied and carried forward down the years. Albright was many things – all of them to high standards. He was a biblical scholar and historian, a linguist as well as being an archeologist and an expert in early ceramics. His careful scholarship meant he was able to merge the science of archaeology and his knowledge of the languages used in the Biblical countries with the ancient Biblical narratives, in several instances proving their historical accuracy. In 1964, when his active working life was drawing to its close, he described himself not as a biblical archaeologist, or even as archaeologist, but rather as an Orientalist. Since his day new methods have come in, often using modern day electronic devices that were unavailable to Albright. Despite this it is with good reason that his writings are described as authoritative. During his life time he received numerous awards including both honorary doctorates, and medals. All archeologists are scientists, but they all also work to some extent using their instincts when making choices – Albright it seems was one of the best at doing so, despite the fact that in more recent years his has received considerable adverse criticism. He did his best according to the skills, knowledge, methods, beliefs and attitudes of his time. Dr Albright was able to bring Biblical archeology into the notice of the mainstream However it seems that, according to Thomas Davis , George Ernest Wright, a student of Albright’s has done work which could bring about the end of the kind of Bible based archeology Albright promoted so well. Despite all the negativism in 2004 Thomas Davis, who makes dozens of references to Albright in his book of that year, still felt able to write that ‘Biblical archeology still has validity as a name for the sphere of interaction of archaeology and the Bible.’ G. Ernest Wright in 1982, described him as:- The dominant creative figure in the attempt to place the Bible in a perspective of the whole of ancient history. References. Albright, W. F. The New World Encyclopedia, available from http://www. newworldencyclopedia. org/entry/William_F. _Albright internet, accessed 12th May 2010 Albright, W. F. to John C. Trevor, March 1948, The Dead Sea Scrolls, available from http://virtualreligion. net/iho/dss. html, internet, accessed 11th May 2010 Albright, W. F. , Abram the Hebrew, a new archeological interpretation, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 163: 36–54. 1961) Albright, W. F. , â€Å"The Ancient Tell Beit Mirsim†, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Number 23, 1926: 2-14, available from http://ancientneareast. tripod. com/Beit_Mirsim. html, internet, accessed 10th May 2010 Albright, W. F. Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, Baltimore, John Hopkins, 1946 Albright W. F. , Archaeology of Palestine and the Bible. New York: Fleming H. Revell. 1932