Free Write: Starry Night

I have a crappy little copy of "The Starry Night" hanging on the wall of my dorm room because I like to look at it as I fall asleep. I used to like it because I didn't understand it; now I love it because I can think that I misunderstand it a little better. While Post-Impressionists were prone to painting unnatural representations of things while maintaining the thick strokes of paint and blurred images of Impressionism, I think I prefer Post-Impressionism to anything else. It's like looking at a metaphor. Sure, the stars aren't really so big and round, and they don't swirl together in the sky like that. But why not? When you look at a night sky, it could almost feel that way on a hilltop all alone, as if the universe is swirling above you, mindless of the bright little town in the valley.

Impressions and point of view in literature are harder to pin down. While in "Story of an Hour" you watch a woman's thoughts following her husband's death come full circle, only to be knocked over with irony, it's only subtly that you get the feeling of the woman's relief and joy. It comes over her like an illness, binding her to the chair. Or is it a rapture?

What about Huck? As a child reading Huck I only wanted to join him on the raft and be there for some of his adventures. As an adult I'm torn between anxiety for the mental welfare of a young man in a prejudiced world and radical amusement at Twain's dry satire. One of my favorite scenes is the mob scene, where a murderer turns a whole town to his way of thinking, simply by tweaking a few strings. I can't remember if this serves to break the mob apart or simply switch its purpose, but I feel that Twain's satire is most obvious in scenes like that, where Huck is simply apart, an individual caught up in a mob of people who would all like to think they believe the same things.

Both Mrs. Mallard and Huck are repressed characters; Huck because he's an uncivilized wild child, Mrs. Mallard because she's a married woman who must defer to her husband. Was her husband a repressive man, I wonder, or was she more weighted down by the expectations of society? Widows, after all, had a bit more leeway with things, tended to be a bit more respectable by themselves. Like the Widow Douglas.

Wait a minute, isn't a Mallard a male duck? What?

Through Huck's innocence and Louise Mallard's unbound joy, these characters create a lens that the modern reader can read through, picking up information as we go. Society had some issues, some hypocrisies, a lot of prejudice. I can see a way into talking about authority, here, but maybe I need to pull back and keep thinking about perspectives/impressions...