tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2700181359641243886.post7159536751500664263..comments2015-05-30T12:58:44.741-07:00Comments on 4th Time Around: The JungleAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11160735803297672220noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2700181359641243886.post-90179141475304103412014-12-17T11:51:43.469-08:002014-12-17T11:51:43.469-08:00No edition of this novel, as far as I know, has ch...No edition of this novel, as far as I know, has chapter numbers. It's the reason we needed to keep specifying the stopping points each day in class, as the only way I can identify these on the syllabus is through page numbers.<br /><br />These comments on Stamp's ideas about "the jungle" resonate with a range of analyses of America's neurotic obsession with race. I'd say schoolteacher's "scientific" approach makes sense in terms of fear: the way that "studying" these "subjects" makes them circumscribable by language and data and seems to "tame" the human emotion, freedom, "wildness" they contain. And Sethe's response to being thus "studied" drives this point home clearly: she experiences it as an unambiguous case of subjugation and dehumanization. It becomes the very thing she wants to protect her children from: they will never feel what it's like to be "measured" in this way. This rhetoric of "wildness" gets ironically reversed in the woodshed scene, where schoolteacher views Sethe's actions as a manifestation of this "jungle"--she was "overbeaten," and this loosed a "wildness" in her, reversing schoolteacher's efforts. But we can see Sethe's seemingly barbaric actions as in fact a highly civilized form of love for her children, a deep desire to protect them from the barbarism of slavery. She is the one who's afraid of the "jungle" in schoolteacher and his ilk, which makes them behave so barbarically.Mitchellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17745167749128309461noreply@blogger.com