The Tempest: "All Up In Yo Face" Edition

Ironically, for my final project, I decided to use The Tempest, the book out of the five books that we read in class that I remember the least of since it was the first on we read.  I knew that I wanted to make a pop-up book for my project because it is original and cute, and really it’s not hard.  I made a pop-up book for a project in Algebra II sophomore year and Mr. Lawrence loved it.  I figured The Tempest would translate best into a pop-up book with the magic and the spirits and island scenes.  Slaughterhouse Five would have also made a really interesting pop-up book, but I felt that was beyond my artistic ability to draw the war scenes and to accurately draw time travel.  Beloved and Othello had a lot of dialogue which I didn’t want to have in the pop-up book.  So, The Tempest was the best option for the project.

I think the pop-up book turned out really cute.  There were a total of 3 people in my group; we each did about 3 pages independently and then put the pages together into a book.  The whole group was dance students, not visual, and that in mind I don’t think our visuals were half bad.  The book did contain a lot more human characters than I remembered and expected to draw and drawing people was a lot harder than drawing say a tree or a boat.  I got a little tired of drawing people towards the end and all of my people have no hands or feet.

The page I am most proud of is the page with Caliban under a blanket on the beach and Stefano and Trinculo asking what he is.  “Is he a fish?” they ask.  The character I am most proud in the book of is Caliban.  The book just describes Caliban as a monster, but it never completely says what he looks like, so for my book I had to imagine him on my own.  I drew him closely resembling a human, but with a few inhumane characteristics that make him different from everyone else.  He has some characteristics of monsters that are commonly known to humans such as vampires (Caliban has vampire fangs), elves (Caliban has elf ears), and beasts (Caliban has very noticeable orange hair all over his body).  Caliban has the possibility of looking normal, but he is a monster, so I made him just different enough for it to be known.

Drunk Stefano and Trinculo examine Caliban under a blanket

From Shmoop.com, the character analysis discusses the debate that there is about Caliban’s appearance and significance to the story, “Is this cursing, would-be rapist and wannabe killer nothing but a monster? Or, is this belligerent, iambic pentameter speaking slave worthy of our sympathy? Is Caliban a response to Montaigne's vision of the "noble savage"? Is he symbolic of the victims of colonial expansion?”  I believe Caliban is meant to symbolize what a monster really is, is it a person’s physical appearance or the way a person acts.  Caliban is the physical monster, but he does not act like a monster.  Antonio is the real monster, wicked and evil, plotting to kill Alonso.  Alonso is seen in the pop-up book on the page where he is encouraging Sebastian to kill King Alonso.  While Antonio appears just like all the other people in the book (mostly because I do not have much variety when it comes to drawing people), Antonio’s smirk on his face separates him from the rest and shows his internal wickedness.  Shoomp.com explains Antonio and Sebastian as “disgusting, but fascinating to watch.”

Antonio encourages Sebastian to kill King Alonso in his sleep

This pop-up book was a fun project and I’m glad I chose to make this thing.

Beloved: A Christmas Special

            I watched A Christmas Carol for the first time when I was in fourth grade.  Of course, with no prior knowledge besides the title, one would assume the story would be a heartfelt Christmas tale with jolly ole’ Saint Nick, a “Jesus is the reason for the season” message, and maybe even a singing of an actual Christmas carol or two.  Instead, the story has a total of four haunting ghosts as main characters and is a creepy tale about humanity and caring for others, before you die and regret the life you led.  Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved share a theme of being haunted by your past and struggling between “certitude and open-eyed humanity” as Michel Faber puts it in his article on theguardian.com.

            “Marley was dead, to begin with,” is the first line of A Christmas Carol.  “124 was spiteful.  Full of a baby’s venom.”  is the first line of Beloved.  Neither Charles Dickens nor Toni Morrison takes time to get to the point.  The first line automatically establishes an eerie and mysterious tone that almost sounds like the end to a story rather than a beginning.  Of course, any good ghost story has to begin with an end, that being a death.  In Beloved, that death occurs when Sethe murders her two-year-old daughter to save her from the life of slavery Sethe had endured.  After killing her daughter, Sethe feels incredibly guilty.    In A Christmas Carol, the death is that of Jacob Marley, Ebenezer Scrooge’s old business partner, equally greedy and dead of seven years at the beginning of the novella. 

            Unlike Beloved, Marley is not murdered and Scrooge does not feel guilty about his death because he had no part in it.  Beloved haunts Sethe because Sethe is stuck in her past and Beloved is a major regret from Sethe’s dreadful past.  Marley haunts Scrooge to save Scrooge from a similar fate of a greedy and ungrateful life, “I wear the chain I forged in life… I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”  Beloved does not serve this same saving purpose.  At first arrival, she seems to.  Denver and Sethe love Beloved and take care of her kindly, but soon Beloved becomes more parasitic and drains 124 of its life until finally Denver is forced out to save the family.  Both ghosts scare the protagonist into a better life, but Beloved does it in a more indirect way.  The roads to recovery for the two are not easy for either Scrooge or 124.  As Amy from Beloved once said, “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”

“I wear the chain I forged in life… I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

            In Michel Faber’s article, Spectral Pleasures, for The Guardian, Faber claims that in A Christmas Carol, it is never significant “how little the supernatural entities in the story have to do with the change in Scrooge; there is no force used, magical or other  Scrooge is humbled not by goblins, but by the paths of his own lost chances.”  This reinforces my point that A Christmas Carol and Beloved are connected by the theme of ghosts influencing the lives of the living.  Both novels are the genre of magical realism, meaning the reason how the ghost are real is not as relevant as to why.  Marley’s purpose is to save Scrooge from a similar fate and Beloved’s purpose is to haunt 124 in spite of her murder, but indirectly saves the family.

wise.

            Even though Beloved isn’t a Christmas tale, neither is A Christmas Carol in a lot of ways.  The two ghosts stories end up having a lot more in common than meets the eye.