Mrs. Holton is the primary figure of
the story outside of Holton, our narrator, and she serves at the
ultimate ideal of elegance. Her home is spotless and perfectly
designed, but Howard's descriptions of every location give away the
darkness of such perfection. Mrs. Holton is described as “some old
idea of beauty” (70), the embodiment of a concept without being
truly beautiful herself, her home is called “lifeless,” the
flowers “seemed never to grow or bloom,” and when remembering how
she felt within the home even at the time, Howard says that “nothing
ever happened here or ever would” (71). Truly, the house and Mrs.
Horton embody the same eloquence Howard's Mother wants for her, but
when it is truly achieved it is no longer filled with life, but just
an imitation. Even Mrs. Horton’s daughter, who passed away at a
young age, is presented as a perfect, lifeless image of what a
daughter should be, that Mrs. Horton tries to turn Howard into
throughout the piece.
Howard best explains this idea of
imitating life with The Attitudes. A series of movements taken from
the Deslarte Method, they are meant to convey and imitate emotions,
greetings, and directions such as Welcome, Calling, Hearing,
Greeting, Farewell, Rejection, Fear, Love, Laugher, and Sorrow. By
turning these emotions into a series of rigid movements, it allows a
true lady to separate from emotions and simply present to the world
what she should be feeling. Howard capitalizes all of The Attitudes,
so you can separate them from a real emotion, and it magnificently
shows how attempting to control emotions renders them meaningless,
and lets you see when she truly feels something. When she describes
her “father's raised first of Angxer” or her “mother's
Unrequited Love” (74) Howard capitalizes the emotions. Was her
father truly angry? Did her mother truly love her? Their actions
sometimes say yes, but by placing their emotions within The
Attitudes, she lets us know she does not think so. On the other
hand, when she expresses being “in love with an Italian boy” (77)
she does not capitalize love, making it clear she truly has the
emotion for him. By using capitalization to separate emotion from
the image of emotion, she is able to convey very different feelings
using the same words.
Even Howard is able to see how useless
the lessons are. She grew ashamed of her performances, and when sent
back for obedience training it does not stick at all. The scene
where Howard goes back to meet with Mrs. Holton seems very cold, her
nursing room home described as looking almost exactly like her home,
giving the impression her life stayed just as empty until the day she
died, and Howard tried to take as little from her as possible, to
illustrate the distance between them. She adds how on how everything
she kept from Mrs. Holton was destroyed, to nicely put a bow on the
story and the time of her life. Finally, as she says good by to her
daughter, she is comically doing the Attitudes. By presenting
herself now mocking what she used to care about so deeply, Howard is
showing how she has long abandoned many of the ideas Mrs. Holton
placed on her, even as she tells her daughter “Chin up. That's
Mummy's darling” (79). By tying the end of the piece to a new
generation, Howard makes the entire piece a very neat, self-contained
story. She also provides her answer to the question presented in her memoir, "Does showing an emotion still mean anything if you don't really mean it?"
Howard does an impeccable job of characterizing the people in the story, such as her mother, Mrs. Holton, her brother George, and her father. I thought it was interesting how she does this by showing the reader how the other characters perceive an individual. For instance, Mrs. Holton is held in high regard by Howard's mother, clearly someone she respects and finds very intelligent. I think the most interesting character is Howard's father. The contrast of him coming to the dinner table in his undershirt, disgusting the rest of the family, and then coming to the table the next evening in a nice suit created this strange character who is mysterious and laughable at the same time (73). Howard writes first how "perverse and crude" of a man her father could be (73). She then writes, "Charming and urbane, he was the most interesting father in the world and we were his radiant family" (74). I think this conflicting character fits perfectly into her questioning of emotions and how true emotions actually are.
ReplyDeleteMaureen Howard's sentences are not those of Wolff; her descriptions run longer, but remain, "just long enough," and the playful nature of her words enticed a loon like myself as the five or so pages slipped by. Her tongue isn't clipped like her contemporaries, and she utilizes the form of the text as a tool to pack more meaning into literary chunk. The speech impediment for example, is imparted to us through her description, but in text imitating staccato speech as well. Once again, it feels a perfect rounded bite of her life, we get a complete story, centering around Mrs. Holton. As Howard's use and view of the poises taught to her change, so does Mrs. Holton stay the same; in that case creating a narrative through the author's demonstration and varying meanings of the techniques at further points in her life.
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting how Howard reflects on her complex relationship with Holton and her teachings. Though she mocks and rejects Mrs. Holton's lessons as "empty gestures" that were meant to separate her from "the hard realities of life", Howard vividly remembers the attitudes and all of her recitals. She also remembers Holton's "lifeless" house. Howard says that the house's details are "more readily available than the arrangements of houses I have recently lived in." There's something about Holton that sticks with Howard, even though she admits that she'll never be the "lady" that Holton taught her to be. I also found it interesting how Howard jumps from her experiences with Holton to parts of her later life, like when she was in college, when she went to a psychiatrist, and when she was with her ex husband and daughter. These small scenes are not jarring; they serve the story well. The whole piece flows and is cohesive.
ReplyDeleteThe "Facts of life" for Maureen Howard are broken into three different sections in her Memoir: Culture, money, and sex. Of these three I found it interesting that the seemingly most boring topic (Culture) was the one that caught my attention the best. I enjoy some of the different startegies that Howard uses to paint a picture for her audience. All of Howard's childhood reminsences of growing up in Bridgeport, Conn. were able to put us into this grim city. I felt anger towards her father when she talked about how he abused her mother. Howard makes us feel for her mother even more by describing her "submissive" behavior. Howard also tells us that her father would show up to the dinner table in just an undershirt to attempt to make everyone afraid. She tells us, "My father was a terrible man...And weren't we chauffeured to our lessons-clarinet, elocution and dance? For what? For us to sit at the table and be distressed, oh it was too bad, by his undershirt?" I liked the way that Howard started this quote out by, like Malachi mentioned, not holding anything back and putting her exact thoughts out for her audience.
ReplyDeleteThe key point that I kept pointing out in the text, is the usage of contrast. Her brother, George, was the one who needs more "help" in terms for his supposed speech impediment, while Howard on the other hand, sees herself as the child that knows it all, to an extent of course. She supposedly knows that George is faking his difficultly. Even though they seem to be on the opposite side of the spectrum, they are actually quite similar in the fact that Howard's parents don't believe that Howard can be so much better than her brother.
ReplyDeleteSimilar to what Jack stated, Holton's belongings seemed to be quite stagnant and dull, which is similar to Holton's life. It's far different than an educator should be--we should want to learn from them and grow under their wing. We don't get this from the Holton/Howard relationship. Could it be because Howard doesn't want to be considered similar to her brother, the supposed opposite from her?
An interesting concept from the piece, is how it all came together at the end. We had personal reflections, we had description, and we had emotional attachment, and it all worked beautifully to produce a piece that evoked all the major components of a well written work.
Howard immediately draws the reader in with her complex drawn-out descriptions and really does a great job of making the reader feel as if they are truly in the story. I really enjoyed the episodic nature of this segment, because while we knew that it was from a more extensive work this excerpt was able to stand alone and give us a complete look at Howard’s coming of age saga. It is interesting that while it is told from her perspective Howard chooses to center the events that she highlights around Mrs. Holton and relates her life experiences to the lessons that she learned and how useless she felt they became as she got older.
ReplyDeleteFor me, there was a certain ironic tone in the way she described Mrs. Holton’s life and home as very dull and sad, and then talked about her Italian boyfriend ‘diddling’ with her and the dank flooded basement that claimed many personal belongings. But in the final scene as she is standing watching her ex-husband take their daughter for the weekend and she says “I laughed and struck the Attitude of Bravery. “It’s going to be such fun. We must never say goodbye" I thought that this was almost an anti-irony, and it made me appreciate the memoir even more.
I think Howard does a good job making a parallel between Mrs. Horton's sterile home and the falseness of that life of eloquence that Mrs. Horton and her mother want for her so bad. Like Jack mentioned, adopting these values and ideas leads to a life essentially without life. I like the way she alludes to that, saying "the world that this studio photo if young Mrs. Holton suggested was so far removed from mine that I never believed in it. It was dream stuff"
ReplyDeleteI felt that she does a good job creating her child's world when she describes her lessons with Mrs. Horton. She compares speaking the vowels to throwing spitballs and roller coasters, and the reader is suddenly right there with her as a child going to these lessons trying to make them fun. I think just by using these specifically placed words she takes the reader into the world of a child by putting them in a child's frame of mind.
As someone who aspires to be a writer as opposed to someone who can write, I am always captivated by writers' ability to inject their personality into their writing. Howard's personality is evident throughout, but some of my favorite sentences come when she mentions the some trouble she got into during her public school days. She writes, "This should have been the end, but a few years later, when I was in public school, I was involved in a cheap incident that shocked my parents (the particulars hidden, fortunately, in some obscure corner of my mind). In this crisis, as with George's stutter, my mother treated the disease of my rebellion as a surface wound. Mrs. Holton was resurrected" (77). These three sentences set the scene coherently. I love how each sentence gets shorter, and the final, "Mrs. Holton was resurrected," stikes like a dagger of truth. Howard seems as though she was content moving on from Mrs. Holton already, but Jason in the "Friday the 13th" movies, she's back from the dead. I'm not sure Howard's choice to use "resurrected" could've been any better.
ReplyDeleteI found the very beginning of this excerpt to be very interesting and telling. The style Howard uses to show how annoyed she was with George. She gives examples of his "stutters" in a quote right off the bat but then begins to use them in her writing. "Though I was eighteen months younger I knew the game he played. He would keep it up- the b-bread, the b-butter and the p-p-potatoes- until my mother's anxious solicitations drove my father to curse George out." Stylisticly I found this very unique and useful; she is showing the reader how annoying this would be because it is not actually a problem. She uses it once more near the end of the first paragraph saying "b-bored out of his mind." As you read it it becomes annoying because it is not quoted and because you know that George does not actually have a stutter. Seeing the dash and same letters repeating made me hesitate. From Howard's stand point, its the perfect way to show how annoying this would have been.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading this excerpt, especially from a writer's point of view. One is immediately drawn in at the beginning with the story of George's shenanigans, which quickly turns around to the story of Howard's exploration of eloquence in speech and manner. It's interesting to see how she ties together the whole story with the repetition of actions in her writing that she had previously explained. For instance, she writes about her brother stuttering and then stutters in her writing, which leads to the meat of the story about elocution lessons; at the lessons she learns about the Attitudes, and then for the rest of the story whenever she mentions one of the Attitudes, or just a kind of feeling in general, she capitalizes its first letter. Howard also constantly refers back to Mrs. Holton's lessons for emphasis. This kind of emphasis and repetition really ties the whole story together and makes the reader remember the key facts of Howard's memoir. Howard's story structure mixed with her intensely polished rhetoric and symbolism make for a cohesive story with a question to be answered: how can you overcome and obtain, in life, without taking too much and learning from the past?
ReplyDeleteWe get the sense that Howard’s child self was smart with keen insight- she is able to see things as they truly are. She calls out her brother (mentally) on his fake stutter and is seems to realize the Mrs. Holtons home, though “immaculate”, is empty of life and it mirrors Mrs. Holton herself. Though I am sounding repetitive of other posts here, I have to say I loved Howards description of the home and how it served as metaphor for Holton and the lessons themselves. Howard’s mother seems to idealize this woman and everything about her, yet she Howard seems to realize that being "eloquent" or "cultured" does not seem to lead to a fulfilled life. It reminds me of the saying "Not all that glitters is gold".
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I loved about Howards' description was her ability to put the reader in the story. The way she describes the lessons "We trilled them and shot them like spitballs at the wall" make you feel like you are in the lesson yourself.
The little things are the things that matter. On 69 Howard says: George, her brother, could "wash it [his stutter] right out of his mouth when he played with Mark Gilday and Dick Ferucci." Why not just say "his friends"? Why give us their exact names? Verisimilitude. To give us the names of the people we associate with provides the fabric of one’s life. We don't know these kids from Adam but when she gives us their Christian names we are impressed by the seeming truth of it all. We're drawn in.
ReplyDeleteEnd of page 69. She describes her verbal delivery: "It is me--the tone held up at the end of a line, the elisions and glides, the glottal softening, the hitch of caesura in my voice." We sort of know what she means here but would really like to hear her say it. It would be great if her book were an audio book. (Sad, but it's not. I check Audible.com). What it does indicate is that she had to do some research to get this linguistic stuff right. How do we know? Well, in order to fully understand her here, we have to look these terms up in the dictionary. Why make it difficult for the reader? Again, verisimilitude. It makes what you're writing more "truthy" as John Stewart would say.
I know I've been saying from the beginning of the course to start with a scene when you're writing your memoir and Howard does that when she starts with her brother George and his stuttering at the dinner table and her father’s response: " 'Christ Almighty, can't you talk?' ", but look on 70 after the double line break where we find her in Mrs. Hoton's house.
Howard describes three photographs that are placed in various ways on "her dining room sideboard." Look how she does it. For one, we don't know exactly where Howard, the child, is sitting just that she looks at these photos with some attention only after Mrs. Hoton leaves the room. So it’s not Howard that is the focus but the photos and what they mean for Howard’s theme. The focus of this long paragraph is on the photos and their details ("her head high with billowing pompadour, pearl choker on a long arched throat . . . ") and her reactions/reflections on them ("The world that this studio photo of young Mrs. Holton suggested was far removed from mine that I never believe it it"). Each photo sets up a distinct notion of propriety that Howard in the rest of the memoir both engages with and makes her own, while she rejects these rules she must follow.
Yet the engagement has a way of overpowering the rejection. We see the teenage angst about how she was made to act with deportment but by the end, the author, at least for a moment, is the perfect model of a Mrs. Hoton girl. The transformation happens in a blink of an eye and then is gone. There is a wistfulness about her time at Mrs. Hoton's that is at the heart of the memoir. She loves that she took elocution lessons--the memoir proves it. She lavishes great attention on it while questioning every part of it. This is a model of how to treat something you love that you also, for whatever reason, hold at arms length, something you loathe but you somehow let flake off like dead skin while what you cherish remains.
I enjoyed Howard’s piece.
ReplyDeleteHoward does a fantastic job of giving us the characters in her life. Her brother, her parents, Ms. Horton. What I found interesting was how Howard uses these characters and their personalities to show us herself.
A part of this story, a lesser part, was Howard’s family life. That her father was angry and her mother almost subservient. The family dynamic is interesting. I feel like Howard questions her parents and their relationship. Which could be another piece, how did this affect her?
My favorite part of this piece was the ending. I feel like Howard was almost unsure of how her time with Mrs. Horton impacted her and she was probing that here. It seems at the end that when all the papers Mrs. Horton gave her are destroyed that Howard has a sense of closure on the matter. To me, it seems as if Howard has resolved her issues/feelings towards this part of her life.