Throughout history, women have been subjected to the fancy of men. They have been ordered to be seen and not heard, to be a pretty accessory on the arm of a successful man. This societal order has given men a complex, an entitlement towards women that can sometimes be dangerous. In “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, the narrator is a textbook example of an entitled man whose musings towards his dead lover border on disturbing. Through examining key verses, it can be noted that the narrator has a difficult time distinguishing the word “love” from the word “obsession.”
Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his works surrounding dead women, but “Annabel Lee” is said to be his most beautiful and romantic poem. In The Philosophy of Composition, Poe states his belief that “‘...the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover’” (706). This essentially shows the template of “Annabel Lee,” focusing only on the importance of the woman in regards to her relationship with the narrator. Her role as a daughter, sister, niece, or friend plays no importance, erasing her humanity as she only exists within the confines of the narrator’s affections. In a way, Annabel Lee could also be considered a Manic Pixie Dream Girl figure—a “magical” girl who exists only to help the male character find fulfillment in life and thus has no purpose herself, though Annabel Lee is not actively present in the poem. The reader learns nothing about Annabel Lee unless it is in relation to the narrator. She has no discernible personality: no thoughts, no actions, no desires. The narrator even says of her, “And this maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me” (5-6). From the narrator’s telling of her, Annabel Lee only lives, or lived more accurately, for him. However, the reader also has to consider the possibility of an unreliable narrator, which is where the distinction between love and obsession comes into play. While the poem first seems to be a letter to a lost lover, a closer examination can show the controlling and possessive tendencies that the narrator actually describes. He claims their love was so strong “that the wingéd seraphs of Heaven / Coveted her and me” (11-12), which seems hyperbolic and more like wishful thinking. This is a way for him to cope with the events that happened, as he then states, “her highborn kinsmen came / And bore her away from me” (17-18). It is quite possible that her family took her away and she later died, rather than the angels plotting to kill her. As previously mentioned, the narrator appears to display a possessive mindset towards Annabel Lee that, possibly, her concerned family no longer wanted her to be around. The narrator then tells himself stories—perhaps after her death, when his mind was consumed with grief—to try to reconcile why they are no longer able to be together. This is all assuming, however, that Annabel Lee even returned the narrator’s feelings. As mentioned above, the reader knows nothing about her aside from what the narrator has told us, whose thoughts and perceptions are obviously muddled by his supposed love (re: obsession) for her. He wholeheartedly believes that Annabel Lee belongs to him, both body and soul, stating that neither angels nor demons, “Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee” (31-32). In fact, in the last verse, it is strongly hinted at that the narrator cuddles with her corpse: And so, all the night tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea-- In her tomb by the sounding sea. (38-41) Calling up images of the ending of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the narrator alludes to the fact that he wants to die along with Annabel Lee, preferably right beside her in her tomb. What is considered to be one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most romantic poems has some clear messages of obsession and stalking. The narrator’s supposed love for Annabel Lee does not accurately appear throughout the poem; in fact, the reader doesn’t even know why he loves Annabel Lee. All the narrator does is project his feelings upon her and regale the reader with the idea of Annabel Lee, not the actual person. Instead of declaring his steadfast love for a woman who has died, the narrator reads as an obsessive mess and highlights some very dangerous patriarchal views of women. Growing up, dress codes had never been much more than an inconvenience for me, like in sixth grade when the air-conditioning broke in the middle school and we weren’t allowed to wear tank tops or shorts that didn’t go past our fingertips, even though shopping for shorts that long was nearly impossible for teenage girls. The first time that the dress code personally affected me was towards the end of my junior year when I was sent home for wearing a skirt with a pair of tights underneath. I can’t even begin to describe the emotions I went through that day: from the confusion of being called to the office to the humiliation of having the school secretary hold a dollar bill to my knee, from the shame of calling my mother to tell her that I either needed to change or be picked up to the indignity of having the secretary repeatedly tell my mother that, “She looks cute. It’s a cute outfit. It’s just not… appropriate.”
I had had friends before me be dress-coded, but I could never truly understand the utter mortification that came with it until it happened to me. Until I was offered the choice of digging through the nurse’s box of old, donated clothes or leaving the school at nine in the morning, my bag unfilled with the homework I was sure to get in English and Pre-Calc and Chem II. I could have changed, but I couldn’t change; I couldn’t bear to go through the day in someone else’s clothes while everyone who had already seen me in my outfit knew exactly why I had changed. I had to go home, and that made it even worse. After my experience with being dress-coded, suddenly I began to see a lot more incidences all over the country. My Facebook page was flooded with posts from outraged parents, siblings, or the students who had been dress-coded, showing a picture of the outfit (which was often perfectly okay and better than my own outfit had been) and a long rant about how the dress code was sexist and harmful to girls’ self-esteem. And they were completely right. School dress codes are particularly harmful. For one, they start telling girls at a young age to be ashamed of their bodies. They’re told to cover up, to not be “that girl.” They are being sexualized at an age when they are just beginning to understand what sexuality is, and it is unacceptable. Girls are persecuted for their bodies, when all they are doing is wearing clothing that they feel comfortable in, because apparently boys cannot handle it. Dress codes are telling girls that, no matter what, their body is not something to be proud of, and that stays with them. As girls grow older, some learn to abide by the dress code and even embrace it, while others go the opposite direction and break it every other day. Unfortunately, this tends to cause a bit of a rift between the two groups. Girls who follow the dress code see someone wearing a short dress and immediately turn to gossip with her friends; the girl wearing the short dress sees someone else in a turtleneck and giggles about it with her friends. And, to be honest, we’re all guilty of this in one way or another: think of those “Top 20 Best/Worst Outfits at the Oscars/Grammy’s/Academy Awards/etc.” We see a low-cut shirt and think, “That’s a nice look.” Dress codes have become such an internalized part of us, but I believe that we can stop it. Whenever I catch myself thinking a mean thought about an outfit, I stop and figure out why I had that thought and why it was wrong. Just because I’m not comfortable wearing something like that doesn’t mean that I should judge someone else for it. We, as women, should build each other up, not tear each other down. Dress codes also perpetuate rape culture. By insisting that girls cover up, they are saying that a boy’s actions, caused by a bare shoulder or collarbone, are a girl’s fault. Any type of form-fitting or revealing clothing is banned because it might make boys uncomfortable and prohibit their learning, even though a bare shoulder is hardly considered a turn-on, even though girls deserve a chance to learn just as much as boys do. It is stuff like this that puts men ahead of women, that allows men to get away with whatever they want. Instead of forcing young girls to cover up their bodies, how about we teach young boys to deal with it? Teach boys that they are the only ones responsible for their actions, regardless of whether a girl is wearing “appropriate clothing” or not. And perhaps the most irritating thing of all is how hard it is to find “appropriate clothing.” When I was younger, my favorite place to shop was Justice (formerly Limited Too), but as the years passed, the shorts they had for sale got shorter and I couldn’t shop there for my school clothes. I couldn’t shop anywhere aside from Goodwill, where people were getting rid of the out-of-fashion, dress-code-approved shorts. Clothing stores made it impossible to abide by dress codes, and it was completely unfair. And when it comes down to it, dress codes are unfair. Dress codes are allowed in the United States as long as they don’t prohibit freedom of speech, within certain limits, thanks to Tinker vs. Des Moines. But just because dress codes cannot censor student speech, that does not mean that they cannot make their students feel small in other ways. My school’s reasoning for the dress code was for students to “look professional”: no uncovered shoulders, no short skirts, no leggings, no colored hair. Yet for some reason, pajamas were completely fine. A girl carried a blanket with her to all of her classes, but my skirt was “unprofessional.” Dress codes are not put in place to keep kids professional, as much as schools insist they are. Dress codes are put into place to make boys “comfortable,” to make sure that girls aren’t dressing “slutty.” I believe that clothes are the least important thing about a person, so why is so much emphasis and blame put on them? My wearing a skirt does not give you the right to judge me, to slut-shame me, to rape me. I want a society where frat boys are convicted for gang-raping unconscious girls. I want a society where men like Brock Turner are given more than three months in a prison cell. I want a society where men like Larry Nassar just don’t exist. If we continue to enforce these antiquated rules of dress codes, I don’t think that those types of people will ever be gone. And I don’t know that they will ever truly be gone even if we do re-evaluate dress codes and make them more fair and equal, but I believe that it will be a much needed start. The theatre is newly redone,
with replaced carpet and tiny red lights on the lip of each aisle step and the red seats are now a hideous mustard yellow in an attempt to match our school’s colors, black and gold, but the change of appearance doesn't change the relief I feel when I step onstage, the weight of the world lifted off of my shoulders, replaced with the glitzy shawl of a new persona, a character I must become. I walk confidently on the panels of wood, repainted every year or two to cover up the scuff marks from tap shoes and high heels which click clack on the stage no matter how quietly you try to walk, and it follows you backstage, as the hardwood changes to linoleum and the heavy heat of a spotlight changes to the harsh glare of a fluorescent, and I remember the time I accidentally knocked a light out, during the summer of 2011, with my queen’s scepter when I nearly missed my cue and hurriedly grabbed it off of the prop table. And I’ve never been much of a makeup wearer but I have to onstage, and I’ve given myself a black eye trying to scrub off the bottom eyeliner, but I can handle foundation like a pro and put on lipstick without a mirror, the tiny stubs in their plastic cubicles, their varying shades of red and brown and pink looking like the contents of a trash can after Valentine’s Day, and the counter is cluttered with the makeup, as well as earrings and necklaces and rings all tangled together, a web of shiny things to get distracted by, and as I put on my costume for Act II, throwing the 40s-style dress on the ground, letting it mix with other outfits that couldn’t find hangers, a girl frantically looks for her bobby pins, blonde ones like her hair, not black, and the helper mom, the one who always brings grapes and pins hemlines, pauses from spraying another girl’s hair with Aqua Net and yells at her to be quiet, and it is, for a moment, until the audience begins clapping, signaling the end of the scene, and we’re thrown back into chaos, and I smile. *This is a writing assignment from my ENG 285 (Intro to Creative Writing) class, and I really liked it. My first attempt at a poem! 1. Spread awareness about sexual assault
2. Spread the knowledge that "Jingle Bells" is a Thanksgiving song 3. Make the differences between juice pouches and juice boxes known NaNoWriMo is over, and I only have 25,522 words. It's a lot less than I'd hoped for, but, if I keep at it, I could potentially finish my book at the end of December. After all, a finished book is a finished book <3
I have officially reached 20,000 words with my NaNoWriMo novel! I'm a little behind, but I'm going strong and determined to make up for lost time! I will have a finished novel by the end of this month!
"On ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur; l'essential est invisible pour les yeux."
(It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.) ~Antoine Saint-Exupery, "Le Petit Prince" (The Little Prince) Open endings don't mean unhappy endings.
They mean hopeful endings. No one person's specialness can cancel out another person's.
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BellaBSU student
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April 2018
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