Anger

Anger is a funny emotion. It can motivate someone to do or feel something completely alien, something completely out of the ordinary. It can create this reaction inside a person that is so opposite of what they have said their whole life, or in this case, book it makes the reader very confused. After Lucy hears her father has died, she feels many emotions, much of which she doesn't really know how to detail. But there is one line that sticks out to me that portrays anger. "My father died leaving my mother a pauper" I realize that Lucy did not have a close relationship with her parents, which is a subject for another blog post, but I didn't realize until this moment that if it came down to it, her feelings for her mother were so strong, whether they be good or bad, that her thoughts would almost immediately travel to her mother in this time of sadness. She is angry at her father for the condition he has left her mother in. She has attempted to express her distance and frustration with her mother the entire book, but when it comes to a time of crisis, she still identifies with her and is angry at the person leaving her mother in a vulnerable position. Even though this person is her own father! The contradictions in feelings I think is a frustration that Lucy struggles with, because she still refuses contact with her family, so who knows what she is actually feeling for her mother, but from this line, it is indicative towards empathy to her mother.

Sharing Faith

One of the things that I struggled to understand after reading "This Blessed House" was the reasoning as to why the previous owners left all of the Christian trinkets. Some of them, such as the towel or the snow globe, are small enough and of little enough value as to be understandable, and replaceable. But there are others, such as the sticker thing on the window, and especially the silver bust that I think would be dearly missed. That is why I came to the conclusion that the previous owners were attempting to witness to the new owners, whether they knew they were not Christians or not. If I were moving into a house that had all sorts of knick knacks that pointed to a certain religion, especially one that I was unfamiliar with, I would be curious enough to dig deeper and try and understand the artifacts and the meanings behind them. The previous owners could have thought this way too, and hoped that in searching for the meanings, the new owners would convert. In my religion class, we focused on conversion, and one of the main things we talked about was the stimulus that drove the people to seek out a religion. These artifacts would act as such a stimulus.

Enabling in "O"

The entire premise for the movie "O" is the deception that Hugo uses to destroy the lives of everyone around him. What he is doing is evil, and should not be tolerated. He should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, and yet, we watch the movie, and feel almost as if he is not responsible for his actions. The directors did such a good job portraying him as the victim of neglect by his father that the view feels sorry for him. By feeling sorry for him, you are just giving in to what he wants, and falling for his lies in the same way that the other characters in the novel do. By giving him a reason to do what he does, it defeats the point of the lack of motives that Shakespeare portrays. The directors of the movie realized that a character acting in a mean or vindictive way for no reason would probably not go over well with viewers, so they gave him a reason, they enabled him. I think that Shakespeare purposely left the reason for Iago's action ambiguous to leave it up to the reader to infer their own opinions. Movies tend to take this ambiguity out and they leave nothing to the imagination of the viewer. I think that the way Shakespeare does it is much more satisfying, because you can truly infer that Iago is evil, and not give him a reason to do the horrible misleading that he does.