Poster Child Battles

As we are still working on the Female Quixote, and we were recently talking about John Locke's and Samuel Johnson's theories involving books and reason, I thought I would head down the same path. I recall thinking on Friday what a perfect poster child our seemingly naïve Arabella would be for Johnson. The one argument that keeps sticking out to me from Johnson is that villains and heroes should be black and white. There should be no confusion whatsoever; no 'sympathy for the devil'. Nowadays, we do not really seem to go for the black and white villains. We like complex characters; the bad guy has a soft spot, or he has a tragic reason for being the way he is. The good guy has a dark side or a tragic flaw, or even has to fight inner demons. We like the duplicity; we expect it, otherwise it does not seem real enough for us. In Supernatural (I've been on a Supernatural kick lately, if you can't tell from my other blog) they even have an episode called 'sympathy for the devil'. I have been to panels with one of my favorite authors about writing likeable villains. These are not villains you love to hate, but rather, you could see how they became the way they are, or the reason they do the things they do. For example, one guy wants to take over the world, and that's pretty bad. But once you see that he is going towards chaos rather than order. For this character, chaos represents chance, opportunity, and creativity. Order represents prison, mental and physical.

Johnson argues that people can be naïve, or simply blindly follow and believe the things they read. However, he also argues that if we listen to people who can read critically, such as himself and start to learn, that we can become better as well. We will be able to see the flaws in books and their characters, and we will be able to think critically and know that a book doesn't necessarily equate to real life. For these reasons I thought Arabella was the perfect poster child. She is naïve in the fact that she takes what she has read at face value and transformed trashy French romance novels into her personal bible. The other fact is the fact that she is too damn stubborn, just like her father, to listen to reason. Johnson's probably right, that if she were to start to listen to how to read the books critically, she probably would not be behaving as she does.

The more we talked in class, the more I realized that she could also be the poster child for Locke's theory as well, but she would be better suited for Johnson's. Locke thinks that what happens in a book should be logical in the book. It might not make sense in real life, but that's the way 'the world' of the book functions. Arabella simply hasn't realized the separation between real life and her book. The next part of his theory that made an impression on me doesn't seem to fit with Arabella very well. He argues that a good foundation in reasoning is what is needed. You can largely get this from getting a good (higher class) education. She has had that education (befitting a girl) and a bit more. And as we see through the book, she can reason very well, and very logically. The only problem is that she can't seem to realize that though the way she acts is the way they act in her books, it is not real, and it is not the way she should be acting.