Monthly Archives: April 2018

Silence of the Lambs 3

As a book, The Silence of the Lambs, a best-seller, won wide critical praise.  The movie, released in 1991, was also a resounding commercial and critical success, winning seven academy awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Sound.   It also generated heated protest from gay rights activists at many theaters and outside the auditorium on the night it accumulated Oscars.  Jame Gumb outraged the protesters.  In more recent years, the film has continued to be both canonized and criticized.  As you read the book and/or watched the movie, how did you understand Jame Gumb and the politics of sexuality in The Silence of the Lambs?  Do you think the book and movie differ in their understanding or depiction of Gumb?  Is the character an anti-gay (or anti-trans) stereotype or something more or different?

Silence of the Lambs 2

Last time, we just started to think about the ways in which Lecter offers us a particular imagining of the Psychiatrist, perhaps born in part from the anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s and 70s.  Chilton also offers a portrait of the professionally trained therapist.  How would you say one or both of these doctors  presents the profession to readers of the novel?

Silence of the Lambs 1

We’ll talk, of course, about Hannibal Lecter and the asylum he inhabits, but how would you characterize the world outside of the asylum in 1986 as Harris portrays it?  Name and describe one or two of the most salient features (emotional, physical, or cultural) that seem to define life in this fictional world.  Where’s the passage where this feature came into view?

Girl, Interrupted

Though not initially aimed at an adolescent and post-adolescent audience, Kaysen’s memoir became very popular with a “young adult” reading demographic. What are the central features of adolescence in American culture? How do you think the book understands this period in life? Is the young Kaysen unusual (pathological) or typical?

Cuckoo’s Nest II

In previous posts on Cuckoo’s Nest, people thought carefully about what it means to experience the novel’s events as narrated by Bromden, who has experienced a range of emotional trauma and possibly some kind of brain damage–or at least fogginess–from shock treatments.  At the same time, he has a well-articulated view of what the psychiatric hospital is designed to do, the way in which it’s part of the “combine”.  How does another character seem to see the role of the hospital in the larger world?  You could think of Ratched, McMurphy, one of several other patients, or even the aides who work on the ward.

Thoughts on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

I’m curious to know everyone’s thoughts on Chief Bromden as an unreliable narrator and whether we as readers are inclined to believe his version of reality. By pretending to be deaf and dumb he alerts the reader to the fact that he is capable of lying, but we also get the sense that in his personal account of his time in the ward he is being as honest as possible. Things get complicated as his accounts of the fog in Part I get more and more preposterous, culminating in the scene of the floating chairs starting on page 115; when Nurse Ratchet turns the dial and slows down time on page 68; and when Bromden has the dream about the furnaces on page 77. He believes he is seeing and experiencing all of these things, but the behavior of the other characters—the night watchman telling him he’s having a bad dream, or the other patients making fun of him for drifting off during a meeting—suggests that these are all incidents that occur solely in Bromden’s mind. I think the narrative is more effective this way though; it is the reality of his hallucinations that most vividly convey his suffering in the ward, more so than if the story were told from a purely objective point of view from a narrator we can depend on. Which leads me to the question of: what constitutes reality? Obviously that’s too broad a question to answer in a blog post but it’s curious, isn’t it, that the more time we spend in Bromden’s head the less sure we are of what reality is and how it correlates to perceived insanity, severe mental illness… or even more common diagnoses like depression and anxiety.

 

Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House

One of the things we discussed in our podcast, but were unable to touch on in the edited version of our file was what we thought Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House would have been rated in its time? Would this expose have been seen as PG or R rated?

Personally, I think that this piece would have been quite shocking to its readers—who I pictured to be upper-middle class women. I think that these women would have been horrified by not only obviously the physical torture, but the day to day horrors the inmates of the asylum experienced as well. For example, the lack of hygiene among women, the freezing temperatures, dearth of edible food…These are privileges the audience of this expose would have been used to. To read a piece where the perfectly sane women that Nellie focuses on are forced to endure life without these privileges would have been especially alarming. However, reading this piece now, it feels as though this piece is largely censored compared to any sort of expose we would read now—even in Nellie’s description of the actual physical abuse.