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Howl is a sprawling piece of work by Allen Ginsberg that has numerous religious, historical, literary, and personal references that can lead readers to endlessly flip through encyclopedias, searching for a meaning in all the imagery. The first section addresses “the best minds of [his] generation” being “destroyed by madness” and then asks, “What caused this?” in the following. This portion of Howl shies away from Ginsberg’s personal relationships and leans more towards political references, seeking an answer to what “bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination.” Known for having “his own idiosyncratic version of communism,” Ginsberg could be a politically charged writer at times and it shows in this part of Howl as he throws capitalism in a bad light (Raskin 170). Allen Ginsberg’s exploration of what destroyed his friends’ minds shows his belief that capitalism is detrimental to society and people, by using it in a visually descriptive metaphor as Moloch, an industrial sphinx that oppresses people physically and mentally.

Firstly, it is important to keep in mind Ginsberg’s quote on his writing: “Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art” (Jamison and Eyerman 152). In terms of being “most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, [and] uninhibited,” it makes sense that part of this writing reads like the unfiltered inner workings and visions of a man hallucinogens, because he actually was inspired to write this section while hallucinating on peyote as stated in his own notes (Ginsberg and Hyde 81). Ginsberg sought to write the way he spoke and thought, sticking to short and simple sentences that had a beat to them (Miles 182). So when reading this section, the punctual and brief descriptions or single words that follow “Moloch!” should be constantly considered together as a summation. They should not be read as individual separate thoughts or ideas on Moloch; they are building blocks in Ginsberg’s mind forming a full picture.

Ginsberg opens with the question, “What… bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” and at first gives a clear answer: a “sphinx” made of “cement and aluminum” named “Moloch.” The word “Moloch” itself is immediately a displeasing word to say verbally and mentally, almost like a blunt curse word. Referencing the mythological sphinx creates an epic mental image that might even have readers think of the Great Sphinx of Giza. Ginsberg wants readers to picture a creature of biblical proportions and even names it after a Canaanite god, which served as a false idol that requires sacrifices. There is also a modern spin on this image though since it is made of cement and aluminum, products of the Industrial Revolution. Ginsberg even had in mind the image of the demonic “Moloch” from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in his drug induced vision as he wrote this (Ginsberg 140).

Moloch is not literally a gigantic mechanical sphinx, but it serves as a great image for the associations Ginsberg brings to it. He immediately places, “Solitude! Filth! Ugliness” right after the first instance of “Moloch!” It is an extremely blunt way to put a displeasing and grimy image in the reader’s mind. Around this filth are “Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!” The unobtainable dollars offers the possible image of a homeless or jobless person. Whether Ginsberg had a single mental image of children under the stairways, boys in armies, and old men in the park or a single character transition from a screaming child to a boy sobbing to an old man weeping, it is a grim and unhappy visual. The way Ginsberg punches these out like “Moloch this! And Moloch that!” feels like loud painful cries. While readers see, “Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!” they still do not fully know what Moloch represents.

Moloch is shaping up to be a metaphor for something political that brings about unhappiness to people now. An “incomprehensible prison,” “crossbone soulless jailhouse,” “Congress of sorrows,” “the vast stone of war,” and “the stunned governments.” If it still does not feel political to readers, Ginsberg starts to layer Moloch with human anatomical parts, which are then layered by very nonhuman and mechanical parts.  It is “pure machinery…whose blood is running money…whose fingers are ten armies… whose breast is a cannibal dynamo…whose ear is a smoking tomb.” These human parts of Moloch are characterized by money, war, technology and death. Ginsberg also paints a breathing and living image of modern industry by giving Moloch “eyes [that] are a thousand blind windows… factories [that] dream and croak.” It’s a grand but unsettling and constantly unfolding image when the reader imagines all these pieces somehow extending and embodying the sphinx. With a “love” that “is endless oil and stone,” a “soul” that is “electricity and banks,” Moloch is a heartless and soulless machine; an oppressive and unforgiving system that Ginsberg calls capitalism (Ginsberg “The Art of Poetry No. 8”).

Things take a turn here though from all the capitalism metaphors when Ginsberg claims, “Moloch whose name is the Mind!” Ginsberg explores inward with Moloch, “in whom I sit lonely…in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!” As if it were a mental illness that he has had since childhood, Ginsberg says Moloch “entered my soul early…in whom I am a consciousness without a body!” The system of Moloch has been affecting the character or Ginsberg for a long time and he cannot seem to shake it away as it is something he tries to “abandon” but then “wake[s] up” in again. It reads like a description of a mental illness that has embedded itself in Ginsberg’s brain.

In the final usage of the word “Moloch,” Ginsberg observes that the people in it’s system “broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven” without realizing that Heaven already “exists and is everywhere about us!” Capitalism is a lie to Ginsberg and has tricked people in praising it as if it were a false idol, thus the fitting name, “Moloch.” It has convinced people that it can take people to a better place by having them build “Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!…Pavements, trees, radios, tons!” The irony is that the people do not realize that the materials and resources they use to lift capitalism up is part of the better world they already live in, creating a wasteland ruled by “Moloch.”

Once Ginsberg is done with the name of Moloch, the tone changes in the final stanzas to a positive one. Ginsberg lists some of the good things he sees in the world “gone down the American river” once he removes the repetitive blunt “Moloch” from the piece. It was as if the word itself was a dam preventing the “river” from flowing. Once Ginsberg writes without the metaphor for capitalism in the equation, he lists “Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!…Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!…Breakthroughs!…Epiphanies! Despairs!…New loves! Mad generation!…Real holy laughter…” Notice the change of the blunt repetitive “Moloch” to these short new exclamations that flow down the “river.” All the dark and gloomy imagery of Moloch has vanished into these colorful, esoteric, and spiritual ideas. Once Moloch is gone, the people who “saw it all…bade farewell” and run off with these new ideas “carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!” To Ginsberg, capitalism is something that affects society as a whole as well individuals. It is a system that “bashed open [the] skulls” of “the best minds of [his] generation” and “ate up their brains and imaginations.”

It can be hard to fully grasp and decipher what a Beat Generation writer is trying to express especially when they are high on Peyote and go through multiple changes in over five drafts (Ginsberg 140). However, given background context such as Ginsberg openly speaking about capitalism in letters and interviews and biographers such as Raskin and Miles divulging in his Communist beliefs, readers may be able to put together pieces of the puzzle (Ginsberg “The Art of Poetry No. 8). Considering the imagery of a large mechanical sphinx named after a false idol and how it causes things such as “Solitude!” and “Filth!” Ginsberg wants readers to have a dark and negative image of Moloch. As he adds political imagery and references that echo aspects of capitalism and a modern America, Moloch becomes a metaphor for the political system that Ginsberg believes is destroying society and the creative minds of his generation. However, once capitalism is removed from the equation, Ginsberg envisions a happier, more colorful and free world with a new “Mad generation” that has a “Real holy laughter.”

Works Cited

1. Ginsberg, Allen. Howl: original draft facsimile, transcript & variant versions, fully annotated by author, with contemporaneous correspondence, account of first public reading, legal skirmishes, precursor texts & bibliography. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Print.

2. Ginsberg, Allen. “The Art of Poetry No. 8.” Interview by Thomas Clark. The Paris Review Spring 1966. The Paris Review Web. 2 May 2016.

3. Ginsberg, Allen, and Lewis Hyde. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1984. Print.

4. Jamison, Andrew, and Ron Eyerman. Seeds of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California, Print.

5. Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Print.

6. Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California, 2004. Print.

 

One of the overarching themes I noticed in Eboo Patel’s “My Neighbor’s Faith” is his use of the physical human body. The anatomy he writes about begins as something tangible that is susceptible to disease and by the end of the journey is something more transcendent– a body with a soul. When he first notices the bad things in the world and how America ignores it, he claims that he does “not want that disease.” He writes about he goes through phases and rebels against this disease by traveling and “pierc[ing] my tongue and dress[ing] in drag on campus.” These are very physical and bodily things that he does in response to a disease he sees. When he helps out at the Catholic Worker house and serves “with love…as a friend” he calls it the “best antidote.” When he becomes more soulful and loving rather than just physically fighting the disease he feels healed. The way he writes this feels very anatomical. It’s when someone tells him to “Find a place where you fit, body and soul,” that Patel will eventually find himself in India with his grandmother and ultimately discover Islam as the place where he fits. He stops writing about the body around here and immerses himself to “desire beauty” and discover “the grand purpose of humankind” and feel “the truth of Islam in [his] soul.” These intangible aspects in religion is what causes a communication between his body and soul and ultimately heals him and makes him feel at home. Physically and spiritually he finds “full nourishment” in the end.

This piece is wonderfully written because of Patel’s use of structure and conveying inward experiences. The story starts off in a place many Americans are familiar with: high school and then college. The structure then follows a chronological journey from rebellious teen phases to volunteering to Catholic worker homes, exploration of faith and the world and ultimately ending up back home. It’s a standard Faith exploration journey that you might hear from most missionaries, but it’s unique in that Patel comes back to his roots by becoming Muslim and is accepting of all religions. It’s throughout the stages of this journey though that Patel describes the inner emotions and connections he feels. He writes the Wizard of Oz trio of heart, mind, and courage. He describes the physical changes he goes through in college, the intellectual “attraction” to the traditions in the readings “on the life of Buddha…every article of Baha’i social teaching”, and the soulful nourishment he finds in Islam.

Throughout all Tomás Rivera’s short works, there is a common unifying theme of the “suffering and the strength and the beauty . . . [of] the migrant worker[s]” that he best knew. Sometimes realistic and grim, other times charming and uplifting, Rivera’s writings look at the difficult or beautiful aspects of migrant worker’s family lives that we might not notice. One of the best examples can be found in The Night Before Christmas, which follows Doña María struggling to buy Christmas gifts for her children. One of the greatest ways Rivera gets us to relate to Doña María is actually by his lack of physical characterization. All the readers know is that she is a mother who wants to use the little money they have to buy gifts for her children. We know nothing of what she looks like, but we know everything about her fear of the world and how she wants to overcome it for her love of her children. Any reader can relate to that motherly love regardless of their demographic. We understand what she feels when the children ask, “But why doesn’t Santa Claus bring us anything?” and the determination she has when she tells her husband she’ll venture downtown herself. We sense the poverty they live in as well the motherly instinct she still has throughout their hardships.

The next device Rivera uses is the plot, the sequence of events that play out for Doña María and how they are laid out for the reader. We start in a comfortable environment for Doña María where we are focused on her and her desire to buy gifts for her children. The next scenes build in a climactic way as we learn that she never leaves the house and gets anxiety outside of it. As someone with a Mexican migrant mother, I have seen this with family members and understand the anxiety they get in a new country with bigger things moving all around them. But even any other reader can understand this fear that this woman has when she ventures out in a whole new world where she knows nothing of how it works. And the way the events play out, the readers dread what happens next as things get worse until she’s arrested. In the final scene, we are shifted to the children who do not fully understand what has happened but instinctively know something. It is a great plot that goes from a mother to her children and shows an inner aspect to a migrant family’s struggle and how they grow from it.

One of the prevalent and interesting themes that I really enjoyed in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was madness. The whole piece already feels like the ramblings and thoughts of a madman, but the theme of madness is most evident in the first section. The first line even addresses it directly saying, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” Upon first reading, I got the impression that the madness he writes about comes from creative geniuses who don’t know how to function in the world so they lose their minds. For example, “whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes…” feels like he’s talking about intelligent minds slowly losing their way into the madness he writes about. But on further examination, especially in section three, it seems that Ginsberg thinks everyone else has gone mad and it is the creative geniuses who have it right. It’s in the third section where he writes about Carl Solomon who “scream[s] in a straightjacket that [he’s] losing the game of the actual ping pong into the abyss.” Ginsberg sees Solomon as a creative genius and “great writer”, but thinks that the psychiatric hospital he’s at is ruining him. It’s interesting to see how Ginsberg appears to have some degree of madness, but in reality it’s the normal everyday society around us that he thinks is mad.

One of the techniques and the form that makes Howl so successful is that it is free verse. Ginsberg isn’t constrained to rhyme or even write complete sentences with correct punctuation. This technique enhances the sense of madness and chaos that Ginsberg writes about. At first, the writing looks very scrambled and all over the place (which I believe it is meant to be like), but if someone reads it in the way it is written as a giant run-on free verse, the madness comes alive and readers can sense it better.

 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a sprawling anti-slavery novel that was so controversial upon its publication that legend says President Lincoln claimed the book is what “started this great war,” upon meeting Stowe. While there were many factors that lead to the Civil War and how much influence the novel had in it is up for debate, Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly struck a chord with the American people in 1853. The ensemble characters and widespread settings throughout the novel attempt to show the realism of the horrors of slavery, but has been debated and criticized for being oversaturated and dramatic with its portrayals and depictions. Whether the criticisms are warranted or not, there is no doubt that Stowe lathers her story with pathos and emotion to draw in readers with stories and reports of some reading through it all night long and weeping throughout it.

When understanding and analyzing Stowe’s text for moments of extreme emotionality, readers can begin to dissect how Stowe was able to tug on reader’s heartstrings. One of the biggest moments of this use of pathos is in Chapter III, The Husband and Father, when George has a moment of anger and frustration. His recounting of the pain and suffering he has gone through single handedly embodies all the examples and possible atrocities a slave may have gone through during his time. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrayal of George’s suffering and love for his family is her way of trying to emotionally persuade readers towards anti-slavery by using over sentimentality and melodrama in George’s backstory and his motivation to free his family.

One of the ways Stowe uses sentimentality in Chapter III is to create a snowball effect of things getting worse as George grows angrier with each story he tells. The first moment where Stowe sets us up for disappointment is when George surprises Eliza and her “bright smile lighted up her fine eyes” upon seeing him. She invites him inside, noticing that he is not smiling, but is still extremely happy to see him and proudly shows off their son, Harry, to him. The readers can pick up on clues that things are not good and George affirms this by dramatically proclaiming “I wish [Harry had] never been born! I wish I’d never been born myself!” which should grab any reader’s attention.  He laments that they all “might have been happy” had they never met and claims “My life is bitter as wormwood; the very life is burning out of me. I’m a poor, miserable, forlorn drudge.” These are incredibly dramatic and morose words to exclaim and rightfully so since Stowe begins to have George recount equally dreadful stories of his suffering.

The first complaint George goes through is how his master is constantly putting him to the “hardest, meanest, and dirtiest work, on purpose” even though he can do better than the tasks given to him. George knows business, reading, writing, and managing better than his master and even knows that “I’m a man as much as he is,” but because he is a slave and his master is a sadist, he will never grow or achieve anything in life. This is not a horribly painful story to read about, but some readers may have been upset by the idea that a smart man was being hindered from potential possibilities. Some Southern slaveowner readers may have been put off by this idea that a slave might possess more intelligence than them and questioned the possibly overdramatized caricature of this smart slave. Stowe even addressed this with a book, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which provided evidence for real life parallel people to the characters in her first novel. There were several examples of young, intelligent mulatto runaways who had invented several farming or factory devices. So while there were real life examples, Stowe still used extremely dramatized language in George’s dialogue to convey his pain.

The second story George tells Eliza starts with his master’s son, Tom, scaring a horse with his whip. When asked to stop by George, Tom kept going and eventually started striking George with the whip. When George tried to defend himself, Tom lied to his father and told him that George was fighting him. Naturally, George’s tyrant master came out “in a rage and said he’d teach me who was my master,” by having George tied to a tree and letting Tom whip him as long as he wanted to. Tom did so “till he was tired.” This story starts to become more gruesome and disturbing for readers since George has just been flogged for nearly entertainment purposes for a young boy. Even George starts to get heated up as his brow “grew dark and his eyes burned with an expression that made his young wife tremble.” This is an extremely disturbing story that should upset any reader who might not know about some of the atrocities of slavery. At this point, some readers should be just as heated as George is.

Finally, George tells one of the most upsetting stories in the novel. His master noticed him feeding a dog that was a gift from Eliza and ordered him to drown the dog by tying a stone around its neck because “he couldn’t afford to have every nigger keeping his dog.” When George refused to do so his master and Tom did it themselves and even threw rocks at the dog as his drowned. “Poor thing! He looked at me so mournful, as if he wondered why I didn’t save him,” recounts George. He even has to “take a flogging” after because he would not drown the dog himself. Dogs dying are always a sentimental tactic to pull on anyone’s heartstrings and the sadistic way in which this dog dies would get any reader upset.

However, while Stowe has overused pathos and crafted a series of extremely emotional events for George, the place where his heart and motivation truly lies is his wife and son. Thus, the chapter is titled, “The Husband and Father.” He finally notes that there will be no happy future for Eliza and little Harry:

 

“Don’t you know a slave can’t be married? There is no law in this country for that; I can’t hold you for my wife, if he chooses to part us. That’s why I wish I’d never seen you,—why I wish I’d never been born; it would have been better for us both,—it would have been better for this poor child if he had never been born. All this may happen to him yet! …  Yes, but who knows?—he may die—and then he may be sold to nobody knows who. What pleasure is it that he is handsome, and smart, and bright? I tell you, Eliza, that a sword will pierce through your soul for every good and pleasant thing your child is or has; it will make him worth too much for you to keep.”
This seems to be where his true motives lie, because he then reveals the purpose of his visit: to run away and buy their freedom. After all the anger and frustration he has built up inside him from the previously recounted events, the true place of emotion that Stowe finds in George is through his family. As a mother who had lost one of her children and wrote the novel based on a vision of slave mother’s being separated from their children, Stowe personally knew where the heart was in these characters and how to use it to pull in readers.

In School Days of an Indian Girl, one of the passages from Zitkala-Sa, readers are shown the changes she went through as a young girl moving to a new missionary school. One of the many themes repeated throughout this passage is her disconnect to the new culture and religion of white people. This theme is on clear display in “The Land of Red Apples” as she first arrives to the new school. She begins to show the jarring adjustment she has to go through as she observes the differences between her culture and the missionary’s.

On their journey to the new school she already calls everyone else “paleface” and feels “embarrassed” as they stare at her. One of the biggest moments showing the culture clash is when she notices a telegraph pole. Rather than seeing it as an inanimate object she views it as a living thing made from a tree and would often “hold (her) ear against the pole, hearing its low moaning.” A smaller moment later occurs when they arrive at the school and in a moment of fear and shyness “a rosy-cheeked paleface woman”tosses her up in the air, trying to comfort her. While it was an attempt to help Zitkala-Sa all she can thing is how her own “mother had never made a plaything out of her.” This memory of her mother causes her cry and her tears are misinterpreted by the “palefaces” for hunger.

While many readers today might not relate to some of the darker and more serious events of this story such as the death of a friend and mistreatment in school, these small moments that Zitkala-Sa write about feel very relatable to anyone who has had to go to a new school. What’s interesting is how readers can relate to that emotion, but the Zitkala-Sa goes a step further in adding culture and religious differences, causing a communication breakdown.

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address, if there’s any one thing the class of students should take from it, it is found in Paragraph 24. Emerson lays out the truth in saying that most of the time people do not want to attend church because the boring organization of prayers, speaking, and repeating can be dry and dull. “It seemed strange that the people should come to church.” He even calls it “thoughtless clamor.” He does not just say this about others but also about himself, “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say, I would go to church no more.” He can relate to anyone who’s ever had to go to mass and thought that the ritual was systematically boring and he does this through an interesting anecdote:

“A snow storm was falling around us. The snow storm was real; the preacher merely spectral; and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him, into the beautiful meteor of the snow.”

To Emerson, the snow was more beautiful and felt more real than whatever the preacher was saying. This feels like such a human truth: whenever we are bored in a class room, at the DMV, or in a bad movie our thoughts can go somewhere else and find anything else more interesting. Emerson takes this to another level in saying that even the word of God being recited by a bad preacher bored him, but he found the true beauty outside in the snowfall.
Despite this harsh truth about boredom in faith, Emerson offers a solution to these future preachers: “convert life into truth.” His main criticism of the preacher during the snowfall was that he couldn’t communicate the beauty of his own life to everyone. “If he had ever lived and acted, we were none the wiser for it.” Emerson is essentially pointing out the key difference between a good storyteller and a bad storyteller. We listen to other people and connect better to a speaker when they can relate a truth in life with us. “The good hearer is sure he has been touched sometimes; is sure there is somewhat to be reached, and some word that can reach it.” And with that, Emerson surely was able convert life into truth for these preachers to better understand how they should go out and preach.

One of the main themes students noticed throughout the first half of Emerson’s Divinity School Address is about the importance in finding beauty in everyday life. Some students identified Emerson’s description of finding beauty in several different things such as nature, the mysterious, and the divine. In the first paragraph, Emerson clearly talks about beauty in nature in both during the daytime and the night. Arthurflores notes Emerson’s colorful descriptions:

“Emerson is using great detail to describe the joy and beauty of life. He describes the sunshining as fire, which really helps the reader visualize the color. He also notes that nighttime does not take away this beauty in any way, rather it may help it.” https://hypothes.is/a/AVLl_7QdvTW_3w8Ly72w

After talking about nature and the beauty it holds in ways we cannot fully understand, Emerson starts to zoom out and talk about beauty in the mysterious and the universe. He writes, “But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched.” On this, mcgrainr believes that “Emerson is saying that the world we live in is beautiful in its natural workings, but when one thinks about the laws of the universe, bigger more existential questions come about such as who are we and why are we here?”:https://hypothes.is/a/AVLYHqkAvTW_3w8Ly6AC

Several other students also saw this similarity noting that Emerson wants us to “open our minds up [to] see the abstract things around us like human spirit and curiosity.” While Emerson writes about this beauty in abstract and sometimes confusing ways, its clear that students caught onto this theme and understood the essence of what he was trying to say.

Upon sifting through the second half of annotations posted in our hypothesis group. There seems to be a couple different themes that are resonating amongst our class. One theme in particular that students of our class began to notice was Religion. When it comes to religion, Emerson expresses his view on the theme of religion in many different ways. In the lower half of his Divinity School Address it is evident in our classes’ annotations these expressions were picked up. According to the annotations Emerson has a very high view of religion so far as to say the way he described it is poetic. Other annotations go on to say he is also extremely philosophical in his choice of words regarding religion. Going further into this religious theme, our class expresses more in-depth opinions on what they think Emerson’s perception of religion is. According to some like in Bnawoichiks annotation: https://hypothes.is/a/AVLiwpQhvTW_3w8Ly7aY. Emerson does hold religion in high regards but only if used properly. Not only in this quote but throughout his address there are subtle hints that seem to be making fun of religion or criticizing it at first glance. The reality being that he is not criticizing religion, but criticizing the fact mankind’s approach to it is all wrong.

This critique of religion also bring up an important theme that out class in a way indirectly addresses. The theme I am speaking of is autonomy. Towards the end of the class annotations they touch on what is believed to be Emerson’s interpretation of genuine religious use. This genuine use in a way is supposed to make people a little more free thinking and independent. Only when man gets too caught up in tradition, themselves, or doing what others think is good do we really lose sight of true religion. One annotation that caught my eye was made by Stephanie.Martinez: https://hypothes.is/a/AVLrhP7HvTW_3w8Ly9XB. Her annotation states that people should do things on their own merit because they truly want to do good, and anyone pretending to do good for other will never be genuine only an imitator. This is a great statement because it shows the difference between those seeking attention for doing goof and those actually doing good.

Jeremy Lohr & Phillip Nieto

In Chapter II, when George’s master reclaims him from the factory, the factory owner whispers words of encouragement in George’s ear and the master looks on with anger. The way is described is, “The tyrant observed the whisper, and conjectured its import, though he could not hear what was said; and he inwardly strengthened himself in his determination to keep the power he possessed over his victim.” For me, the description of this scene paints the slave and slaveowner in two extremely different lights, trying to remind the readers of the horrible aspects of slavery. The master is described as a “tyrant” who has to control his anger towards George and is driven by the need to exert power over him. A reader of this time might feel the word “tyrant” hit them hard and notice the weird and horrible mentality one must have to be determined “to keep the power” over another human. Stowe could have written “the power he possessed over his property” or “George,” but decided to use the word “victim.” In choosing “victim,” George is humanized in the readers mind as someone who has been hurt.  It’s the small choices like these that go a long way in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“Now, John, I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.” For any reader’s during Stowe’s time that believed slavery was justified through the Bible, this is Stowe’s condemnation of that. This is one of her many attempts to get readers to notice the glaring contradictions between the Bible and slavery. Mrs. Bird here is choosing to follow her religion and conscience rather than the follow a law stating they have to turn in any runaway slaves. Stowe attacks the religious angle of things by trying to have readers understand that if they truly followed the word of God they would know that they would take in any slave, not just the hungry, naked, and desolate.

In Bejamin Franklin’s Autobiography he writes frequently of different ideals that he tries to encompass while encouraging fellow Americans to do the same. One of the values that Franklin writes about to a large extent is “industry.” Industry as a value is a theme that runs throughout the autobiography but he first explicitly writes about it when he mentions his father recounting the following proverb: “Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men.” While he says that following this advice literally led him to meet several kings in his lifetime he also “considered industry as a means of obtaining wealth and distinction…”

One of the ways to Franklin tries to sell the ideal of industry is through humor. When he uses the proverb saying that industry can lead a man to stand before kings he makes a cheeky joke that says while following a proverb won’t always literally lead you down its path he actually ended up meeting 5 kings and dined with another.