This last week of discussion of
Arabella's 'foible' got me thinking about her in a different context.
In my Language Systems and Linguistic Diversity class we have been
discussing the case of Genie (humor me, this does have a point. I
promise). For those of you who don't know about Genie or need a
refresher, here's the gist:
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Genie was abused, neglected, and
isolated by her family until she was nearly 14 in the 1970's. She was
tied to a potty chair in her room with no social interaction
whatsoever. She was discouraged to even make sounds. Once she was
taken into custody they did everything they could to try to teach her
to walk, talk, and, for lack of a better term, become normal. They
were able to teach her to walk, though she tended to walk in a
'bunny' fashion with her knees bent and hands held out, and they were
able to teach her to speak a little. She had trouble with the actual
semantics and rules of English, but her vocabulary was much more
advanced than someone else at that learning stage. She lost valuable
time in her critical periods for language acquisition.
One thing they learned about Genie is
that her right brain was well developed, however, her left brain was
so underdeveloped it was nearly not developed at all. The left brain
in language development is where we store all the rules and
semantics. It is more reality-based and prefers symbols (such as
writing and upper math) and is much more rational and logical. Genie,
being purely right brain dominant was more emotional and impulsive
and needed concrete things. Though she didn't have much to look at in
her tiny room, she did have things to see and stimulate her somehow.
Now, to the point, the right sided person is more imaginative and
fantasy oriented.
Arabella lives purely in her right
brain. She lives in a fantasy she created, but learned it from
something concrete to her (she takes her romances as concrete
history). However, just because she is creative and imaginative does
not mean that automatically rules out reasoning. Arabella's intuitive
properties are wonderful. She puts them to use often, but still based
on her concrete histories. This also helps since we know that the
right side of the brain is the first to develop.
We know that
children need a model to learn from (learning how to speak,
walk, write, etc. We know children learn... they are not taught),
which is wherein lies the problem with Genie, obviously since she had
no human interaction whatsoever. This could be one of the reasons
that we have so much trouble with Arabella as well. She did not have
enough human interaction in her life to better devolop the left side
of her brain. She does have exposure to her father often, and she
occasionally got to interact with tutors, and Lucy, but that is the
only interaction she has had. Perhaps if she had more human
interaction her left brain would have been stronger and she wouldn't
rely purely on her right side fantasies. Plus, if she were to be
around more people starting from an earlier age, she would have
learned at an earlier age by all her 'models' that what she read in
her books is not the norm anymore if it ever was.
Your reading of Arabella using what we know now about the development of the brain is really interesting. I don't think your analysis is far-fetched at all. In fact, you might be able to develop it into your larger paper (i.e. analyzing Arabella though the lens of what we know know about how the brain develops).
ReplyDeleteMinnie- very interesting post. Although I agree with you that Arabella lives in a fantasy world, I don't think that she lives purely by her right brain, because not only does she have the ability to use logic, but she utilizes it often in her arguments- in fact, she's pretty good at reasoning. Of course, her logic only works within the rules dictated by her world of fantasy most of the time, but she displays an extreme competency when it comes to reason. We see this when she holds her own in her rhetoric in book 6.
ReplyDeleteI see what you are getting at Minnie, but Genie is so extreme of a case that it's really hard to measure her against Arabella who was given an excellent education. So while she is portrayed as being very isolated, though certainly far less than Genie, she has much deeper cognative development, both right brain, and left, because she does certainly reason with a great deal of logic, though it's source is flawed. Still, it's very interesting to consider how a person in her position would have developed had the author not been compelled to write a happy ending.
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