Spring 2001 Midterm

Section 1: Apply the dreamwork theory to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Good Trip” or to Keats’ “La Belle dam sans merci”. How is the piece like a dream?

I read Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad,” both versions from 1819 and 1820. From the French language, it means “The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy.” The title right there tells exactly how the story is going to go. The plot of this poem, in either version, is about a knight telling a story about how this “woman” gave him drugs and is now slowly dying because of it.

It begins that one knight sees another doing nothing, but looking ill. The sick knight then begins the story of what has happened and why he’s not out slaying dragons and rescuing damsels in distress. In the fourth stanza, he talks of a “faery’s child” and how her eyes were wild, giving the idea that she could have been an animal or wild child. Just realizing from the next stanza, it proves that she is a seductress as well as they “roll around in the hay.”

In the sixth stanza, there are a couple meanings when referencing to setting her on the knight’s horse. It could be an image of him as the steed, or actually her on this horse. Also, she began to sing a “faery’s song” giving reason that she is like a siren or witch still wanting to control him.

Now that she has him under her “spell”, in the next stanza, she begins feeding him all sorts of things to hallucinate, such as the drug opium. By this time, he couldn’t tell what she said but assumed it as “I love thee true” when it could have been “I’m going to eat you!” He also wasn’t hard to move, which she did, to her cave; and into her territory. Here, he kissed her closed eyes four times and than fell asleep to dream.

The last three stanzas are about the knight’s dream. In the dream, there’s a warning that the woman has no mercy and had him captured. When he awakes, he finds himself on the hill’s side. And the last stanza just repeats that was what happened to himself to the other knight.

This poem can be closely related to a dream which either Keats himself had or the knight in the poem had; as though he had a dream within a dream. Either way, this story reads as if one was trying to recall the memory of a dream to someone. Like a dream, some portions are detailed and others are hard to remember because they’re so vague. Because one tries to remember a memory, certain aspects could be altered and forgotten.

In the first three stanzas, the knight is talking to another, which seems more detailed than the rest of the story because it takes so many lines to tell. Another example of a detailed portion of the dream would be when the opium drug was running through his system, in stanzas seven to nine. Of course, the drug could have also effected his dreaming of the pale warriors and such in stanza ten.

The most vague parts of the “dream” would be when it said, “And nothing else saw all day long” in stanza six. Perhaps something else was seen but could not be remembered from the memory of the dream.

Lastly, the story was narrative, except for the first three stanzas, so it is quite possible that either the knight or Keats was translating the memory of the dream. Or perhaps he was actually speaking in the dream and this was how he conveyed it.

Section 2: What happens to the concept of humanity in a world of frustration, loneliness, and violence where some people seem to be sinking to ape level or below? In such a situation, the struggle to remain human and civilized is truly heroic. What is your own definition of humanity and potential nobility of character in your world?

Humanity, by definition in today’s standards mean “the condition or quality of being human” and in being human we can acquire intelligence by experience and teachings. In Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler, this definition quickly changed once leaving the safety of a walled community. Still, in some communities, this definition was altered. Humanity and civilization go hand in hand. “Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function (89).” It would be very difficult to have a civilization function before it would be exhausted and destroyed without the humanity of the community. As Lauren says in her Earthseed: The Books of the Living poetry, “People tend to give in, to fear and depression, to need and greed. (91)” This shows that people do give in because of the depression, loneliness, frustration, and violence. She continues in this poem with how people struggle against each other and how they continue to kill, like animals that want to survive. It is inevitable that in a world like Lauren’s that humanity will have a low level; into “survival of the fittest (and smartest).” Some of those who are weak are able to make it to their destinations because they are smart. Just as Lauren had emphasized to Harry, “We’re a pack, the three of us, and all those other people out there aren’t in it. If we’re a good pack, and we can work together, we have a chance (163).”

Lauren has been heroic. Although she and those she traveled with chose to survive as an animal pack, she learned to survive. She was still civilized and human, but differently because of she acted as part of a pack. Her humanity level didn’t lower to that of an ape because she didn’t ever give in to the frustration, violence, and loneliness. In any other case that had given up, their humanity would have given up with it.

The other character that was heroic, in my opinion was Harry. All throughout the book he struggled against turning less than human. Even when he talked with Lauren about being a pack to survive, he struggled with the fact that she was right and he had to change his way of thinking. Just as when he mentioned not killing a wounded man that attacked them, he stated to Lauren, “Everyone’s guilty until proven innocent? Guilty of what? And how do they prove themselves to you? (162).” He didn’t want to kill someone because to him it would mean that he wasn’t civilized anymore. Any perhaps he was either afraid of being less than human, but a mere animal in a pack, or else he was still living in the walled community where he felt safe and didn’t feel the need to kill for survival.

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