Italic vs. Non-italic

Page 192, "Yellowstone Park:"

Technically, this ought to precede "The Figures in the Clock," since it happened a year and a half before Miss Gowrie's play. But I have placed it here because in "Yellowstone Park" I seem older. This may have been because I was not in school. Also, in Medicine Springs, I was having to live up to a role that "grew me up" overnight. Once I was out of that curious wonderland where all the men were married, I shrank back to my nomral age."

I found this passage particularly interesting because it suggest that age is not really the same as the number of years which a person has lived; age can shift back and forth, from older to younger or younger to older, not in accordance with actual shifts in time. I thought this was remarkable because it suggests that, although McCarthy has not lied, she has readjusted chronology out of it's original order to make more chronological sense... a peculiar idea, but one that I find very appealing. I think that we may all experience moments when we feel older or younger than our "real" age, and I know that I have, so I felt I connected with this idea more than some others presented in this text.

How Memory Works

Mary McCarthy's final chapter begins with a series of memories regarding her grandmother. The further the memories are placed in the time, the less Mary remembers about them. The memories become more specific as they become more recent. This is a realistic representation of how the memory works. The further back in the time the memory is, the more trouble a person may have remember details. For example, Mary first recalls her grandmother's gray electric, the way it looked, and the many instances in which it pulled up to her house. The last memory in the series is specifically oriented around the time that her parents died of the flu. She remembers her grandmother's sobs. Then, she remembers a vision of her grandmother five years later when she returns to Seattle.

"I did not see her again until five years later, when she was standing in the depot in Seattle in a hat with a black dotted veil, pulled tight across her face, which was heavily rouged and powdered. By this time, I knew that she was my grandmother, that she was Jewish, and died her hair."
(Page 202)

Mary's memories become clearer as well as the amount of knowledge that she knows about her grandmother. Before this memory, Mary could barely note that she was related to her. Are there any other points in the autobiography in which you believe the writing mimics Mary's memory/ability to recall events and information?

~Megan

Ideas about Intersubjective Exchanges - Italic Disclaimers

Mary McCarthy – Memories of a Catholic Girlhood – Intersubjective Exchange – Patterns

“As an intersubjective mode, it lies outside a logical or juridical model of truth and falsehood, as models of the paradox of self-reference have suggested….” Smith & Watson (13)
««««««««««
from Smith & Watson: “But autobiographical truth is a different matter; it is an intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared understanding of the meaning of life.”(13)
««««««««««

“If we approach self-referential
writing as an intersubjective process that occusr within the writer/reader pact, rather than a true-or-false story, the emphasis of reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding.” Smith & Watson (13)

To The Reader
Yonder Peasant , Who is He?
[“There are several dubious”…]
A Tin Butterfly
[“Uncle Harry tells me”….]
The Blackguard
[“This account is highly fictionalized…”]
C’est le Premier Pas Qui Coute
[“This story is so true….”]
Names
[“A good deal of stress has been laid…”]
The Figures in the Clock
[“There are some semi-fictional touches here.”]
Yellowstone Park
[“Except for the name of the town & the names
Of the people, this story is completely true.”]
Ask Me No Questions

Italics vs. Regular

Hopefully this is what we were supposed to post about..
I believe that Mary McCarthy uses the italics sections of her autobiography to be completely truthful. Perhaps McCarthy believed that if her entire autobiography was written as bluntly as the italics are, no one would want to read it. I very much enjoy reading the italic sections because it is the blunt truth about her life. I feel that during the italicized sections I get to know the real Mary McCarthy. I also find that her italicized sections are very humorous, perhaps because she is being so blunt. I think that the italics offset the "regular" writing in her autobiography.

Truth & Lies

In January 1980, Mary McCarthy in a television interview with Dick Cavett was asked for an example of an "over-praised" writer. She named Lillian Hellman, stating "who I think is terribly overrated, a bad writer and a dishonoest writer." When Cavett asked what she meant by "dishonoest," McCarthy responded, "everything ..... every word she writes is a lie including 'and' and 'the."

Subsequently, Hellman sued for libel in a $2.25 million lawsuit, later dropped at the time of Hellman's death in 1984. McCarthy apparently felt put out, stating: "I still feel disgusted by the amount of lying that didn't stop. I wanted it to go to trial, so I was disappointed when she died."

Catholic Thoughts

"An aggressive churchgoer, she was quite without Christian feeling; the mercy of the Lord Jesus had never entered her heart. Her piety was an act of war against the Protestant ascendancy..."


I think that this is an example of something common among religious zealots today. I have always found it ironic that many influential religious leaders are the ones preaching intolerance; intolerance against certain groups of people, either of a different denomination or sexuality, for example.

As a practising Catholic, I find it a waste and a shame for someone to use their religion as a means of emanating superiority or a source of leverage. During this day and age, we are all exposed to the discrimination that can be found between different religious groups, and also the harshness of some who claim to be "serving the Lord." What ever happened to WWJD? Spread love!

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood

"Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. I do not know how my grandmother got the way she was; I assume, from family photographs and from the inflexibility of her habits, that she was always the same, and it seems as idle to inquire into her childhood as to ask what was ailing Iago or look for the error in toilet-training that was responsible for Lady Macbeth."

(Page 33)

"Many  a time, in the course of doing these memoirs, I have wished that I were writing fiction." (Mary McCarthy, 3)

Memories of a Catholic Girlhood: Losing Faith

"These priests, I thought bitterly, seemed to imagine that you could do nothing for yourself, that everything was from inheritance and reading, just as they imagined that Christ could not have been a "mere man," and just for that matter, as they kept saying that you must have "faith," a word that had become more and more irritating to me during the past few days..."
(Page 123)

I think that many people go through a time in their life when the word "faith" means less to them than a stranger passing by on the street. Mary is clearly becoming irritated with the idea of faith because the Church and Catholic doctrine has defined what faith should be. She doesn't want to be told how to think, and that is clear in many other instances in the memoir. Her distaste of the word "faith" reminds me of a time when a friend of mine told me that she is "half-Jewish and half-Catholic." To me this seemed strange, and for some reason it has irritated me until this day. I told her that a person's religion cannot be mixed like nationalities can be. You can't be half-Jewish and half-Catholic, because you would be a complete hypocrite. You can't believe that Jesus is the Messiah one day and completely throw that belief out the window the next day. She did not understand me and just shook off what I had said, reminding me that she received double the presents during the holiday season. And then people wonder why religion is so often associated with hypocrisy!

Have you ever experienced a loss of faith? Did you regain this faith in something or someone, or did you lose it forever?

~Megan

Chiasmus

Sorry for the delay of my post, but I want to share a quote I found that to me is an example of chiasmus:
"[Captain Auld] was a slaveholder without the ability to hold slaves." In my copy it's on page 50, but it can be found in Chapter 9.

This quote stuck out to me as I was reading it because it just seemed so odd at first. It's hard for me to think, with all that I have learned about slavery, that there was a slaveholder who was not "born" for the part. I think that the idea of having someone who owned slaves but had really no idea how to do so is absurd to me. After seeing this quote, I thought more about it and realized that it wasn't such an odd idea after all. No one is born into being a certain way, but it is a matter of developing into such behaviors. Unless someone is born into wealth, they don't always hold the personality of someone who is rich when money comes into possession. It's like Douglass explains, Captain Auld was not born into a family that had slaves. This way, it's easier to understand how he did not seem to have the ability to "hold slaves."

The Appendix

"Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds, faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love and justice, for success in my humble efforts, and solemnly pledging myself anew to the sacred cause, I subscribe myself..."
(Page 163 in my edition)

I just find it extremely intriguing that Douglass utilizes the words truth, love, and justice in the final paragraph of his narrative. Truth, love, and justice were ideals that he never knew during slavery. He would have been beaten for telling the truth. He was separated from those he loved on almost every occasion, and, of course, he never knew justice. He witnessed injustices almost every day. I personally feel as if Douglass believes that these three words are laws of life, laws to live by. I think that Douglass taught himself to believe in truth, love deeply, and treat others justly even though he never knew these aspects of life while growing up in servitude. I guess these three words are rhetorical in and of themselves, because Douglass escaped the bonds of slavery, and only then was he able to believe in the powers of truth, love, and justice.

Can you think of any ideals and values that you hold now that you did not hold as a child? How did you learn to believe in these ideals? What caused a change in the way you thought about the world?

~Megan
Have a great weekend everyone!!!

A Perspective

from bell hooks: Feminist Theory from Margin to Center: "Living as we did - on the edge - we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focussed our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both."