The Real-Life Corporations of "The East": Directv

For the Grapes of Wrath action project, I decided to contact DirecTV. My parents and I had actually been having problems with our DirecTV bill for the past few months. So, by using them in the action project, I was hoping to possibly resolve our billing issue in the process of getting in touch with a high ranking official at the DirecTV office.

Back in December, Directv charged a subscription of Cinemax to our bill that we did not request. When my mother, who handles our bills and financial matters, called to ask why and how the extra fee was put on our bill, the Directv employee on the other end said that we simply "did not understand your billing statement". When she asked then if the employee on the phone could explain anything that she wouldn't have understood they did nothing except restate information that was clearly already understood by both parties. Since we did not pay for the Cinemax that was wrongly included on our bill, we received late fees on the monthly bills that followed, up until March. Right before the action project was introduced to me, my mother decided to simply “bite the bullet” and pay for the few months of Cinemax that Directv had charged us for. A few weeks ago, when I had the opportunity to take action, I decided to call the company once again.

Since my problem and issue was rooted in the billing department, I decided to call the number on one of the incorrect bills we had received in one of the months past. Similar to the experience that my mom had, I spoke (with great difficulty, because none of the phone operators spoke very good English) to a woman who merely kept repeating Directv’s billing statement and process to me. After further trying to explain my issue and asking if I could speak to someone who could help me more directly, my call was transferred. I then talked to a woman who I assumed to be in charge of the billing and that type of business. She had attitude with me right from the start and acted like she couldn’t have cared less about the issue with my bill. After a few minutes of back and forth discussion about my billing problem, she gave me a less than sufficient answer, almost her way of beating around the bush instead of coming right out and saying “Well I don’t know what you want me to do about it”, or something along those lines. Finally, before ending our conversation, she said the most they could do was “credit our account” for the late fees we paid on the Cinemax.

The incorrect charges on our bill were never fully resolved, and our account has yet to be “credited”. As a final step, I decided to go one step further. I looked up the name of the CEO of Directv on their very own website. While doing this, I also learned that the last woman I spoke to must have been Ellen Filipiak, the Senior VP of Customer Care. After getting the CEO's email address, I sent him an email describing all of the above issues. After spending much time, patience, and care on the email, I sent it out only to be promptly returned with a “postmaster delivery failure notice”. The email address of the CEO, Michael White, provided by the company itself is either incorrect or out of date. I googled Mr. White in hopes of finding more information and an alternate email address, but was unsuccessful. I did, however, find a discussion board of other unhappy Directv customers trying to email Mr. White as well! It seems that he doesn’t want to speak to the “average” people who are being inconvenienced by his poorly organized company.

On that note, this real life situation shows a striking resemblance to the Grapes of Wrath novel, with Mr. White being “the East”. Both seem to be unbothered by the unhappy and inconvenienced people that their actions, or lack thereof, are the result of. My situation specifically reminds me of the family in one of the early chapters of the novel who speak to the driver of the tractor who demolishes their house, just less severe. The tractor driver is simply doing his job, much like the phone operators at Directv that I first spoke to. I was obviously angry at them at first, but then realized that there is a much bigger entity to blame.

In conclusion, I now think I know why Mr. Currin assigned us this task. It was to get us to see that the issues that we are reading about in a fictional novel that was written several years ago are very much relevant to things that are still happening in society today. 

"An Image of Africa: Racism In Conrad's Heart of Darkness"

The article titled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” written by Chinua Achebe criticizes the acclaimed novel written by Joseph Conrad for being a racist novel. From the point of view of an African Literature professor and native Nigerian, there are many examples from the text that cite said racism, some that might not normally be picked up by the untrained eye.

From the very beginning of the novel, Conrad portrays the continent of Africa and its inhabitants as prehistoric, inhuman, barbaric, and even ugly. He writes, singling out the natives, exclaiming that “the whites of their eyes can be seen glistening in the darkness”. Continuing the same description, Conrad describes their faces being “like grotesque masks” and “streaming with perspiration”. Dialogue is also a choice way for Conrad to subliminally and possibly subconsciously incorporate some discrimination against the Africans into the novel. Their speech is described as “incoherent babbles” and “short grunting phrases”.

I use the term subconsciously for a few reasons. The time period in which Conrad was born, and that which he lived through as well, was not aware of the rudeness and  disrespect that came about when being racists and discriminatory. This raises the question as to whether or not Conrad can be considered a racist, when he can’t really be blamed for the views of the time period in which he was raised.

On that note, a similar subject was addressed in our Socratic on Tuesday. It was brought up that a person can’t really be criticized or attacked based on their opinions and views, because they were most likely raised to believe those things. Had Conrad been born at a later time, and raised in a different country or family, would the subject of his novel even be under criticism? Likewise, it was brought up in the Socratic that racism, particularly white on black, was essentially a part of human nature at the time that the novel was written. That is one of the reasons that Heart of Darkness hasn’t gotten many criticisms from this aspect. 

The Awakening Article Analysis and Response

The article I chose to analyze for The Awakening was focused on the effect of painting, music, and the arts on Edna and how they are related to her “awakening”. A majority of the article, which I found myself agreeing with, was rather how the arts failed to help or save Edna, in the aspect of saving her life from the social restrictions of the time and herself.

Author Roberta White notes that it’s odd that the readers should naturally think that painting and music would save Edna, giving her an outlet for the things that she couldn’t express, but it does the opposite. There are several ways that Edna fails as an artist, which ultimately lead to her downfall. But before that part of the analysis is mentioned, White makes an ingenious point. Kate Chopin actually incorporates the visual arts into her literature, almost making up for the lack of art in Edna’s life in the story. The vivid descriptions and sensuous language used, especially when talking about the sea (which ties in wonderfully) create a whole new dimension of art for the readers. A very moving line from the article even reads “her suicide seems fated by the language”.

When it comes to Edna herself as an artist, she ultimately is responsible for her own “failure”. Living in New Orleans, there were so many real-life thing that she could have drawn or painted to express herself. By choosing to visually ignore the life around her, she missed out on so much. Relating back to the first point mentioned by Roberta White, the art of the novel itself is superior to the art created in the novel. A major downfall is that her passion and romantic ways distract from her painting rather than contributing to it. She should have harnessed the emotion she had to channel it into something good, but instead it weighed on her.

The arts had much to do with the shaping of the novel The Awakening, in the story line and the actual writing itself. In Edna’s case, the arts failed to save her in her most desperate time of need. Since it was noted that her romantic excursions distracted her from her painting, it is interesting that in the article it also said that Edna liked to get away to the sea with Robert and Arobin because it took her away from her obligations as a mother and to the Victorian social rules, if only for a moment. So though she enjoyed it, the arts is what eventually caused her to commit suicide. 

The Yellow Wallpaper

I enjoyed The Yellow Paper. It was a very unique story that is very well written, but written unusually. The woman who narrates the story was certainly peculiar. The way she talked towards the end of the story almost seemed as if she was schizophrenic. I was not sure if she truly believed that she was the woman in the yellow wallpaper?

On that note, I think the wallpaper represented the woman’s illness. Whether it caused it/contributed to it or not, it was connected in some ways. The more the woman analyzes the wallpaper, the worse her “illness” seems to get. This is also strange, since her outward symptoms seem to get better, at least to the eyes of John and Jennie. As far as the woman’s relationship with her husband, John, I don’t think there really is much of a relationship. He treats her more like a child who he has to watch. Perhaps the lack of proper attention and miscommunication contributed to her illness and fascination with the wallpaper. You can’t just lock someone up in a solitary room all day.

When her illness started to get worse, the tone of the book began to get unsettling. It was like an innocent sort of creepy. The woman didn’t see anything wrong with the fact that there was seemingly a creepy woman walking and creeping around her room at night. Just reading it gave me an uneasy feeling. The history of the room also added to the weird feeling it gives the reader. The fact that it had been used for other things previously and there were markings on the walls, like from the infants in a nursery, gave it an almost ghostly feel.

Overall, I think that the woman went mad, and suffered from a form of schizophrenia, or even multiple personality disorder. Even if she did end up being the woman in the pattern of the wallpaper, she talked about herself from a different point of view.

Ethan Frome Article Analysis and Response

The essay that I chose to read and analyze focused on the Freudian desires of Wharton and her unconscious mind and how it pertains to Ethan Frome. Author Fedra Asya touches on several different interpretations of Wharton’s writing of Ethan Frome, relating it to her past and connecting it to the principles of Sigmund Freud and his belief in the unconscious mind.

Firstly, Asya suggests that Wharton wrote Ethan Frome as a way to express her wishes for an incestuous relationship with her father. Wharton was closer with her father as a child, having fought with her mother often. Based on Freudian theory and the inferences of Asya, she suggests that Ethan Frome was a semi autobiographical work, Ethan being Wharton’s father and Wharton herself being Mattie. It is thought that Wharton confused love and admiration with incestuous desire, because she hadn’t experienced love before the first version of Ethan Frome was published. Sigmund Freud was very keen on the idea of children lusting after their parents, and he said that it was a common and even normal aspect of the human subconscious mind.

Going further into that subject, Wharton branched out in her subconscious while revising her novella. After having an affair and experiencing lust and desire firsthand, Wharton felt a subconscious “guilt” for have had such desires towards her father. The version of Ethan Frome that we read, where Ethan and Mattie are crippled at the end of the story, was Wharton’s way of subconsciously punishing herself. She “unknowingly” made Ethan (Wharton’s father) and Mattie (herself) suffer for her own thoughts of wanting a relationship with her father. Freud would call this a “punishment dream”.

To me, it is astonishing the verity and correlation between Freudian theories and principles and Wharton’s Ethan Frome. It really makes me look at the novella in a different light and adds another dimension of strangeness and also adds depth and meaning.

Ethan Frome imagery blog

"Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.” (Wharton 69)

Out of the numerous examples of vivid seasonal imagery, I chose this passage because it seemed different than most of the others. What drew me to this passage was that it has a darker tone than the other examples that I came across while reading. I believe that this can either be attributed to the fact that it is indeed night time that is being described in this part of the novel, or it could be a remark on the coming events of the story. When Wharton writes that there was “a mournful peace” hanging over the fields, to me, it suggests a “calm before the storm” feeling.

In this way, I think Edith Wharton uses this imagery to tie into the story. It seems like the passage can be related directly to the strange situation that is brewing between Mattie, Ethan, and even Zeena, in the aspect of it being foreboding.  I love how Wharton uses such powerful words that not only vividly describe the setting and atmosphere of the story, but relate it directly to the storyline.

Also important, I think Wharton used these select words to compare the actions of the night sky and it components to Ethan’s feelings. Just before the imagery passage, Wharton writes about Ethan reminiscing about how he and Mattie longed for each other the night before. The “moon being swallowed by the clouds” could be Ethan’s feelings for Mattie being lost in all of his other emotions and concerns.

Nevertheless, this passage does a great job describing the setting of Ethan Frome. 

Sonnet 147

Sonnet 147 is almost bittersweet. For the majority of the sonnet, Shakespeare declares that he is lovesick for a woman. He says “my love is like a fever” (Shakespeare 1) and he yearns for anything that will prolong his “disease”, which would be the fever. He is desperate for the love of this woman and profoundly hurt because he knows that he cannot have it. The last two lines seem to change drastically, from lovesick and hurt to angry. He says that the woman is not as beautiful and charming as he thought she was, and she is indeed “black as hell and dark as night”. Although, it is possible that he is only saying that out of rage, because he still loves her despite how hurt he is. In my research, I found that this sonnet was actually written about Shakespeare’s alleged mistress, who was in fact African American. This could be a reference to sonnet 130, where he says her breasts aren’t snow white but he loves her anyway, because being extremely white was considered most socially acceptable at the time.