Morning, noon & night : finding the meaning of life's stages through books

415 Pages·2011·2.29 MB·English

by  Weinstein

ALSO BY ARNOLD WEINSTEIN
Northern Arts
Recovering Your Story
A Scream Goes Through the House
Vision and Response in Modern Fiction
Fictions of the Self: 1550–1800
The Fiction of Relationship
Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction
from Hawthorne to DeLillo

Copyright © 2011 by Arnold Weinstein
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Permissions acknowledgments can be found on this page.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Weinstein, Arnold L.
Morning, noon, and night: finding the meaning of life’s stages through books/by Arnold
Weinstein.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-67960447-1
1. Life cycle, Human, in literature. 2. Human beings in literature. 3. Maturation (Psychology)
in literature. 4. Aging in literature. 5. Literature, Modern—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN56.L52W45 2011
809′.93354—dc22 2010017523
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design by Susan Zucker Koski
Jacket painting: Evelyn De Morgan, Night and Sleep, 1878 (© The De Morgan Centre,
London/Bridgeman Art Library International)
v3.1
To Catherine and Alexander
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
GROWING UP
Itinerary: Morning to Noon
The Uses of Innocence
William Blake’s Chimney Sweeps
Innocence and Growing Up in the Thirty Years’ War: Simplicissimus
Growing Up as Huckleberry Finn
The Idiot’s Tale: William Faulkner’s Benjy
The Little Princess: Marjane Satrapi’s Marjane
The Lessons of Experience
Lazarillo de Tormes: The Hungry Child
Picaresque Wisdom: The Swindler
Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot: A Capitalist Education
Charles Dickens’s Pip: Haunted and Homeless
Understanding Power: Growing Up as the Invisible Man
Love
Falling in Love
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Marguerite Duras’s The Lover
Love Gone Wrong: The Story of Abuse
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Stories of Abuse: In the Margins
Wuthering Heights Redux
Jane Eyre Redux
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea
Familial Sacrifice: Kindermord
Charles Dickens
Henrik Ibsen
Going Under in Franz Kafka
William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson
Systemwide Sacrifice: Children and the Nightmare of History
Art Spiegelman’s Maus
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Wild Child
William Faulkner’s Light in August
Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace
Toni Morrison’s Sula
Growing All the Way Up
William Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin
Alice Walker’s Celie
Time’s Paths, Literature’s Paths
GROWING OLD
Itinerary: Noon to Night
Fathers Undone
William Shakespeare’s King Lear
Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot
The Aging of a Salesman: Willy Loman
Exiting the Stage
Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder
Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King
The Old in Love
POSTSEXUAL
Rip Van Winkle
Charles Dickens
August Strindberg
William Faulkner
SEXUAL ANXIETY
Othello
Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois
UNSANCTIONED LUST
Molière
Hamlet Accusing Gertrude
Jean Racine’s Phèdre
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice
The Final Harvest
THE FINAL HARVEST AS MIRAGE
Discovering That You’ve Never Lived: Henrik Ibsen
You Missed Your Life: Henry James
Waiting for the Light: Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law”
Unmasked at the End: Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries
Experience as Fraud: Montaigne, Sartre, Burroughs, Calvino
THE GOOD FIGHT
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
Philip Roth’s Everyman
LIFE’S PLENITUDE
Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage
James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom
Love’s Legacy
KEEPING THE HEART ALIVE
Gabriel García Márquez’s Aureliano
Ingmar Bergman’s Helena
THE EYES OF LOVE
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73
Old Cities, Old People: Sigmund Freud
Poetry and Memory: Charles Baudelaire
The Optics of Love: Marcel Proust
ENDURING LOVE
J. Bernlef’s Out of Mind
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Permissions Acknowledgments
About the Author