Hero or Villain?

Hero or Villain? Maybe the difference between you and he is not so huge. And isn't that your thesis, the Robin Hood world view? That one man is much like another. That the poor are no different from the wealthy, but just as deserving. Why can't you apply your principles to those who have been deprived in another way, deprived of love? (Marian, “A Clue: No”)

Everyone knows the story of Robin Hood, the infamous outlaw who stole Maid Marian’s heart along with the riches of the wealthy. His story is repeated in numerous tales, including a short segment of the movie Shrek in which Monsieur Hood grabs Princess Fiona in the middle of a forest. Confident in his righteousness, he declares that he is her “saviour” in a French accent and attempts to woo her only to end up unconscious on the floor for being “annoying”.

To put a modern perspective on the story, lets say you left your wallet in a public bathroom with a hundred dollar bill in it. You do not realize you left it until hours later and when you return to the spot, it is gone. At first, you panic and search around the whole bathroom meticulously before running to the nearest authorities in the hopes that some kind soul had found it and turned it in. Unfortunately, you either get it back with nothing in it, or do not find it at all. You return home dejected and drown your sorrows in a strong bottle of alcohol. You probably start wondering what sort of evil bastard would do such a thing to YOU of all people.

However, the person you just labeled as “evil” is now giddy with relief as he can now buy some food for his family. Of course, he could not pass up a hundred dollar bill! With all the credit cards, he saw in that wallet of yours he figures you would hardly miss it. He does not care that you worked your ass off to earn that money or that you were going to use it to buy a special gift for someone special. All he cares about is the survival of his family. Interestingly, the “thief” could have avoided this situation altogether with the help of the Robin Hood Foundation, which has created a website called Robin Hood: Targeting the Poverty of New York. Of course, he would have to be a resident of New York to profit from this, but it’s an interesting thought nonetheless.

Anyways, Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy of Gisbourne did not sit by passively and let Robin Hood get away with all of his plunder. Indeed they proclaimed him an outlaw and stole his home as well as his beloved, Marian, away from him as shown in the following scene where Sir Guy, accompanied by Marian and his noble friends are celebrating the King’s birthday:

GUY: Hood! I don’t remember inviting you.
ROBIN: Since when has a man needed an invitation to his own house?
GUY: I don’t know, perhaps since he lost all rights to the house by becoming an outlaw.
ROBIN: Ha, ha, ha. I would’ve declined anyway. My men and I are here on business. Please! Everyone! If you could assist us by removing all of your jewelry and valuables and handing them to that man over there, Much! And then proceed to that room where you will all wait quietly until we’ve gone.
GUY: Do as he says.
ROBIN: Wise decision, Gisboune. (“Tattoo? What Tattoo?”)

In many modern versions of Robin Hood, he tries his best not to kill, even when his enemies give him perfect reason and opportunity to. Not long after the scene above, he has Guy at his mercy and is quite willing to kill him, but his loyal gang of outlaws rush to his side and still his hand because, as Much explains, “We do not take part in bloodshed unless absolutely necessary.” (“Tattoo? What Tattoo?”). Five episodes later, however, Robin Hood manages to kill a guard, surprising his arch nemesis the Sheriff of Nottingham: “What is this? Hood does not kill! (“A Clue: No”).

As for Sir Guy, he admits that he “committed a crime, grave crimes. Meaningless crimes. But by taking Marian in holy wedlock, I will wash away those crimes. Her pure heart, will cleanse mine.” (“A Clue: No”) Unfortunately, he seems rather misinformed as two episodes earlier he stabbed Marian with a dagger coated in hemlock while she was stealing the riches that were soon to be hers anyway under the guise of the Night Watcher, one of Robin’s outlaws. (“Return of the King”) Even his “friend”, the Sheriff of Nottingham, fails to tell him important information, as seen in the following scene:

SHERIFF: The King is not coming.
GUY: What do you mean the King is not coming?
SHERIFF: He is in the Holy Land! [Guy does not look best pleased] I've arranged an impostor. Think about it, is the real King, who has spent God know how long fighting in the Holy Land going to stop of for a visit in Nottingham, a clue: no.
.............................
GUY: Why didn't you tell me?
SHERIFF: Awh, oh sorry, nothing personal, hmm. Anyway, you should thank me, you get to marry the girl.
GUY: Yeah, but based on lie the King is not really coming.
SHERIFF: Oh isn't that despicable, hmm, I don't know how you could live with yourself. (“A Clue: No”)

What they are referring to in the second half of this excerpt is a promise Marian made to marry Sir Guy when the King returns to England. Guy is noticeably disturbed by this new information while the Sheriff seems quite pleased with himself. Indeed, the Sheriff is a hard character to get behind in this series, as is common with Robin Hood stories. However, his intentions seem to be to liven Nottingham. Surely such a setting can get boring after a while and who’s to say the commoners don’t enjoy the excitement? Sure, plotting to kill the King may be going a bit too far, but how else is he supposed to keep his protagonist interested? When natural disasters happen, doesn’t some part of you wish it was worse? Don’t you wish that meeting the right person will somehow cleanse you of all your mistakes? Who are we to judge fellow humans, when we are also one of them? Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.

Works Cited

“A Clue: No”. Robin Hood. Writ. Dominic Minghella, Fox Allan. Dir. Matthew Evans. Perf. Jonas Armstrong, Lucy Griffiths, Richard Armitage, Keith Allen. BBC. 30 December 2006. TV.

“Return of the King”. Robin Hood. Writ. Dominic Minghella, Fox Allan. Dir. Matthew Evans. Perf. Jonas Armstrong, Lucy Griffiths, Richard Armitage. BBC. 23 December 2006. TV.

Robin Hood: Targeting Poverty in New York City. Robin Hood Foundation, 2002. Web. 9 Dec. 2009. http://www.robinhood.org

Shrek. Dir. Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson. Perf. Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Vincent Cassel. Dreamworks, 2001. DVD.

“Tattoo? What Tattoo?”. Robin Hood. Writ. Dominic Minghella, Foz Allan. Dir. DeclaO’Dwyer. Perf. Jonas Armstrong, Lucy Griffiths, Richard Armitage, Keith Allen. BBC. 25 November 2006. TV.

Test 3

The Post Colonial Short Story
Kathrine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” starts with a description of the Sheridan family’s garden and the preparations for a garden party. The mother usually makes the decisions, but this time she wanted her chil-dren, Laura, Meg, Jose, and Laurie to decide instead. Laura, being the most imaginative of them, took up the challenge, although it seems most of it took care of itself. In fact, the mother planned much of it beforehand anyway. Laura and her sister Jose had just finished tasting the cream puffs and were about to head for the garden when Sadie (the maid), Hans (one of the servants), and one of the cooks came in and told the two that a man had died in the little village nearby. Laura was appalled and pleaded with both her sister Jose and her mother to stop the party in order to spare the family’s feelings. Neither would al-low it and called her childish and too sentimental. Eventually they suc-ceeded in quelling her fears and had a delightful party. However, at the end there were still some sandwiches and cream puffs left, so the mother decided she would send Laura to the cottage to give them to the dead man’s family. When Laura arrived, she started to have sec-ond thoughts about going, but it was too late to turn back. The family pulled her into the house when all she wanted to do was leave the basket and go home. When she saw the body, she thought he looked peaceful and content. In the end, she concluded that life was a mar-velous thing.

I believe that the main theme of this story is growing up or maturing. When Laura was talking to the workmen she was shy at first and “stammered like a little girl” (2646) after trying to sound like her mother. This suggests that she was still growing up and was not used to doing adult business. After her talk with the workmen and Kitty, on of her friends, she started to daydream a bit. The following excerpt is an example of this:

“But the air! If you stopped to notice, was the air always like this? Little faint winds were playing chase in at the tops of the windows, out at the doors. And there were two tiny spots of sun, one on the inkpot, one on a silver photo-graph frame, playing too. Darling little spots. Especially the one on the inkpot lid. It was quite warm. A warm little sil-ver star. She could have kissed it.” (2648)

Three pages later, her mother calls her childish because of her insis-tence to stop the party. Laura couldn’t understand why her mother and Jose were acting like that because it felt wrong to be happy when neighbors were sad. When she looked in the mirror, however, “There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies and a long black velvet ribbon.” This is when she starts to see that she’s not quite the child she thought she was.

I liked this story because Laura’s childishness reminds me of my own in comparison to others. I am still a bit afraid of walking into the wide world alone and barely feel like I have the skills or courage to leave home. I could see both side of the dilemma about stopping the party because I would have had the same worries as Laura. However, I would also be annoyed if I had gotten all ready to have some fun only to have it ruined by an unrelated event. In the story, I am guessing that the man’s death would be much like if someone died in a village close to my house, like Hemlock. I would not know them personally, but it would be close enough to be shocking.

20th Century Poetry
In “Snake” by D. H. Laurence, the speaker tells about a hot summer morning in Sicily. Apparently, his house has no indoor plumbing, so he comes brings his pitcher with him to gather some water from a trough in his backyard. However, he finds that a snake has beaten him to it and stands, waiting on the steps in the shade of a tree. As the snake is drinking, the speaker is musing about its color, which would indicate that it is poisonous. Even knowing this, he stays his hand because of fear of the snake, a want to talk to it, and a feeling of honor that it chose his trough in which to drink. After the snake finished drinking, he turned and entered the hole from whence it came. Now unfrozen from his reverie, the speaker puts down his pitcher and throws a log at the trough, which startled the snake. The speaker soon regrets dis-turbing the peace of the moment and wishes the snake would come back so he could atone for his pettiness.

The speaker personifies the snake as it was “drinking, as cattle do” (16), “came like a guest in quiet” (27), “looked around like a god” (45), and “seemed to me like a king, / Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld” (68-9). He comments on the “earth-brown” (20) color of the snake and the stone texture of the trough, which makes it easier to visualize the scene. He also uses a bit of juxtaposition of how the snake was supposed to be venomous, but instead seemed innocent and peaceful. Furthermore, he remarks on how his education de-manded he kill the snake, while his inner nature wished only for peace, respect, and understanding. This is a bit odd as when one usually things of human nature, it is usually the education that brings peace and tempers human urges to destroy things. However, one could say that it is our higher thinking that makes us so destructive and that the speaker was tapping into the animal side of his being.

I chose this poem because I found Laurence’s description of a snake interesting. This poem also seems to be the one that touches the clos-est to human nature that I have read from the 20th century poems. My mother has always been afraid of snakes, but I respect them rather than fear them. I know what they are capable of doing and so avoid them, while mom starts screaming and breaks what could have previ-ously been a peaceful moment. Animal personification intrigues me, as when you look at domesticated animals, individuals tend to have dis-tinct personalities. My dogs, for example, are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Abby is hyperactive and eager to play while Hanna is le-thargic and I have never seen her play at all. Thus, I believe I could say the same for any other animal in the world. This, of course, leads me to wonder why I was born as a human and not some other animal. This idea leads me to the reason for my existence and the old question of “am I alone?”

Required Question
One obvious image that piqued my interest was in A Modest Proposal. The thought of a whole society turning to cannibalism to solve their problems is quite a profound image. I admit that I tend to hope that absurd things like this would happen just to see what would come of it. Of course, if I was one of the children to be eaten, this would be no laughing matter. It is just the idea of it that makes me wonder what it would be like. For example, children are told not to talk to strangers, but what if a stranger only wanted to help? Wouldn’t that put the child in danger?

Another concept that stuck in my mind was that of Iago. It got me to thinking about how heroes and villains really are not very different. This is obvious as this will by my fourth paper in this class mentioning it, so I forgive you if it has gotten a bit repetitive. I have been talking to a few friends about it too and they agree: heroes and villains are opposite sides of the same coin. Heroes are villains that get away with murder because its “justified” and villains are heroes that can do any-thing because they are not obliged to society. It reminds me that the government usually calls heroes “vigilantes” for a reason. Yeah, they may get the deed done, but they usually cause a lot of damage doing it. That is not to say that being brave or opportunistic is a bad thing, just not when it is at the cost of life.

The third image that made me think was in “The Poison Tree”. The ini-tial image is that when friends do you wrong, it is easier to forgive them than when it is a stranger with whom the grudge intensifies through lack of communication. This grudge grows until it is a want for them to die, as visualized in the final lines of the poem. Going beyond this, however, is the thought that when a friend does an unimaginable wrong and you stop talking to them the grudge grows all that much quicker because you are more likely to dwell on it. After it festers too long, no amount of communication will make it heal. Thus, this is the usual situation for the best protagonist/antagonist relationships in sto-ries. And this brings me full circle to Iago and the hero/villain theory, so I’ll leave it at that.

Reflection 9

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a satire of the Victorian obsession with morality and earnestness. Jack pretends he has a brother called Earnest in order to protect his family in the country from any form of embarrassment on his behavior in the city, in which he calls himself by his “brother’s” name. Thus, he morally does the right thing, despite his lack of earnestness. His friend, later revealed as Jacks older brother, pretends to be Earnest in order to spend time with Cicely, which I see as morally wrong. The name of Earnest plays a big part of this satiric theme as both Gwendolyn and Cicely admire the qualities it suggests, which, ironically, neither man seems to possess. In conclusion, I believe the author is commenting on how being earnest does not mean one is morally right.

In Elizabeth Browning’s Sonnet 21, the speaker comments on how he or she must hear that they are loved every day in order to still their doubts that they are false. The speaker recognizes that the lover sees each utterance as the skipping of a broken record. The speaker also demands that his or her object of affection loves him or her truly. What the author may have been saying that much true love has been lost as people focus more on properness and moral standards.

Reflection 10

In the third page of The Dead by James Joyce, Gabriel remarks on how the poem he is prepared to recite may reflect poorly on himself in the eyes of his listeners as seen here: “He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.” (2509) This is an example of prestige. Of how important it is to him how other people view him.

There is much evidence of this in my life as I strive to live up to my parent’s expectations and to look good in the eyes of my friends. I listen more than speak in conversations in order to make sure I make the right impression when I do speak. I help others so that I feel good in knowing they think me kind. When I am sad I try to hide it as I tend to also get angry and say things I later regret.