Aggressive Apathy

"We are outraged and demoralized less by the impending end of our species,
less even by our inability to prevent it, than our failure to discover the cause” (5).
P. D. James's The Children of Men (1992)

Points for Reflection

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "I, being born a woman and distressed" (1923), PDF

1. does this sonnet strike you as veering more towards the comical or serious?
2. does this sonnet adopt an English (Shakespearean) or Italian (Petrarchan) format?
3. which emerges more powerfully in the presence of the auditor, the narrator's mental powers or her bodily urges?
4. does whatever physical intimacy alluded to here provide a valued, relational consummation?
5. what emotion dominates the narrator's feelings following her experience?
6. does the poem make clear the gender of the auditor?

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love is Not All" (1931), PDF

1. does this poem yield to the assumptions of Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
2. should "man" in line seven be read as gender neutral?
3. does "peace" in line twelve connote peace of mind, or some other form of peace?
4. do the circumstances under which the narrator might sell or trade her/his love constitute impossible, absurd conditions?
5. why the lines of a sonnet about love with a rehearsal of what love cannot accomplish?

Children of Men, chps. 1-8

1. does the narration provide any likely suspects for why humanity loses its sexual fertility?
2. how does the epistolary, letter-writing form of narration (here, diary entries), shape our understanding of Theo’s character? Why might P. D. James switch back and forth between an omniscient narrator and a first-person narrator?
3. Julian notes (38) that whereas G. Eliot (Marianne Evans) sympathizes with her heroine, Dorothea (of Middlemarch), H. James despises his own heroine, Isabel Archer (of Portrait of a Lady) What of P. D. James’s attitude towards her own protagonist?  Does our author sympathize with or despise Theo Faron?
4. trace those moments when Theo self-consciously refers to: 1) a scenario concocted by his imagination, or 2) notes that he “tells” or “convinces” himself of something.  What is P. D. James doing?
5. why does Theo begin a diary on his fiftieth birthday?
6. why does Theo not “want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything” (26)?
7. can we deduce why Theo became a professor specializing in Victorian history?
8. what evidence does Theo summon to back up his assertion that he is emotionally stunted?
9. do Theo’s many failings make him less or more sympathetic as this novel’s protagonist?
10. can we deduce why Theo became a professor specializing in Victorian history? [sec 01: Ryan T]
11. do the Arts retain their power in the new world order?
12. does religious belief and practice make a resurgence, remain steady, or steadily decline in the face of humanity's extinction?
13. do Theo’s comments about Christianity’s changing, post-Omega significance constitute a complete rejection of a disproven superstition, or something else?
14. what spaces and places have been retasked in this dystopia?
15. what has happened to Britain’s education system?
16. as the population slowly dwindles, do the survivors occupy more, or less, domestic space?
17. do our survivors consciously gravitate towards isolation or community?
18. does the post-Omega world create new interpersonal problems concerning sexual intimacy, or does it merely uncover and/or magnify already existing problems? [sec 01: Manuel V]
19. is Theo’s sex life healthy prior to Omega?
20. does the text provide an answer as to why the male and female Omegas are beautiful and have difficulty sympathizing with others?
21. are physical and intellectual pleasure outmoded artifacts of the distant past, or do our characters still find ways to obtain them?
22. which better characterizes society in this novel, chaos or order?
23. how capable do scientists prove in tackling society’s new problems?
24. what do the various concerns of the Five Fish—those issues they’d each like raised with the Warden—reveal about their individual characters (57-59)? [sec 02: Bryson S]
25. why might the author give Julian (the former student of Theo’s who asks for his help in convincing the Warden to change his policies) a disability, a swollen hand with middle and forefinger fused together (39)?
26. in a well-written novel, no character is extraneous. What purpose is served by the introduction in chapter seven of Jasper Palmer-Smith? Does this fellow professor mirror Theo in every particular? Do his perspectives on the cataclysm, women, Christianity, and marriage echo or deviate from those of Theo himself?
27. what mysteries surround Xan’s character, from his cousin’s, Theo’s, perspective?
    

The Sunshine Roof (1934)
Cyril Power

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu