The Price is Right?

When I considered this topic for my blog I decided I would stick the phrase “selling your soul” into a search engine and see what came up. To my incredulous surprise the first couple of sites were step by step instructions on how to go about selling your soul.  At that point I couldn’t pass this topic up.  Some people are looking at the topic as a complete joke and others are taking it extremely seriously and already picked the pen they plan to sign with. Personally I do not have a monetary “price” for which I would sell my own soul under normal circumstances.  However if a loved one was suffering or dying or if I had the opportunity to do something really important for someone I think I might have to consider my options. This made me ask myself a couple of questions. Do the motives behind the act really make a difference? Would a willing soul be worth the price offered? What happens if you change your mind; and is it even possible to change your mind? When we read Doctor Faustus as well as Dorian Gray it was clear that the characters asked some of the same questions. While doctor Faustus was seeking limitless knowledge though the magic received from Lucifer, Dorian Gray pledges his soul so that his painting will bear his age so that his youth will never leave his face. The motive for both acts are very different, however, how can you determine which character was more evil or which was more wrong for making his decision. Personally I believe that both were equally wrong for making the decision at all but others may disagree. The position of selflessness could be argued. If someone sold their soul in a “selfless” act would it make a difference? I truly can’t decide. Both stories also include thoughts by the characters to take back their souls and repent to be forgiven although neither ends up doing so in the end. I see this as showing a theme that once your decision is made you cannot go back on it. I understand that it is believed that if you repent and ask for forgiveness from god all will be forgiven. The fault in this is that I’m not sure that someone who was willing to sell their soul in the first place would hold the strength and perseverance to repent and ask for forgiveness. They could clearly be swayed in the beginning and therefore could probably be swayed again. I wonder if those in extenuating circumstances in Japan after the tsunami would sell their souls to get the heck out of there.  Although I do not have any personal anecdotes about being tempted to sell my soul to the devil, (ha..) I feel like it can be connected to many people in the world on a much smaller scale. There are people everywhere who have jobs, family, friends or other circumstances that make them choose between following their own strong beliefs or those that are imposed upon them by others. The fact that many of those people give in for one reason or another makes me think that, many, for the same or different reasons may find that their soul happens to be on sale.

The Eternal Battle

Nobody will ever win the Battle of the Sexes.  There's just too much fraternizing with the enemy.  ~Henry Kissinger

Upon reading this when I was deciding what to write about this month I forced myself to stop and think about the infamous “Battle of the Sexes”, when and why did it begin and will it ever truly end? When you look specifically at the statistics as far as the connection between women and education or the workplace it is obvious that things are changing. According to the US department of Labor, in 1950 about one in three women participated in the labor force. By 1998, nearly three of every five women of working age were in the labor force. Also according to the US Department of Labor, among 1998 high school graduates, more women than men enrolled in college. As of October, 938,000 young women who graduated from high school in 1998 were in college while 906,000 young men were enrolled." The trend of more women attending college continues. Although the motives behind these changes have not been polled or made into statistics I would guess that the biggest motive that women have for this behavior is to prove to men that despite having been oppressed and seen as the inferior gender that we are in fact the superior gender. Because history does point out the assumed superiority of man, women feel as if there is in fact something to prove when in reality there isn’t. This issue is very old and can be shown in our in class reading of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” as she describes how women writers can be tainted by a underlying meaning to their work that is in response to something else or trying to prove something and how this can make the piece of literature lose it’s integrity.  Today, as the tides are changing between men and women I think that we are losing the hunger for equality and become obsessed with being superior to all others. Personally I do not wish to be a part of either the dominating or dominated group. While searching for this equality or justice I feel that some women have lost track of what it means to be independent. I predict that in the next few decades women will become the dominating gender and I can only hope that we do not end up oppressing others as we were oppressed in history.in conclusion I would like to add a quote that I thought fit her just nicely. “You don't have to be anti-man to be pro-woman.”  ~Jane Galvin Lewis



Splendid Results of a Mothers Love

As a child, just like many others, I received endless love and support from my friends and family, especially my mother.  Neither of the main characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini had mothers like my own, which I found interesting, and after some further pulling from the story I realized that the importance of a mother figure as well as the absence of a mother figure in these girls’ lives is a reoccurring theme. Without the basic fundamentals learned from a mothers love and nurture you would think that a girl would not know how to function as a daughter or as a mother later in life. The search for these basic fundamentals and love are evident in the novel both in Mariam’s desire to be a mother better than her own, and Laila’s desire to have a mother figure more nurturing than her own, which they find in each other.

Mariam had a close relationship with her mother, probably only due to the fact that they lived alone together and she was extremely dependent on her mother. Despite this closeness, Mariam’s mother is anything but supportive and nurturing. Because of her mother’s negative disposition (some might call it realistic), Mariam spent her entire life in disbelief of the ugly truths that her mother told her about the world, and most importantly her idolized father. Mariam admitted that she believed that her mother told her those lies so that Mariam could never really be happy. By constantly telling Mariam that she was a harami, from a very young age Mariam’s self-image and confidence was weak to say the least. Mariam’s mother also contributes to her idea of her self-worth through the following line: “Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have.” That line puts a cage around what Mariam believes she is capable of and hinders her from trying to make the best she can out of her life and to settle for the cards that life deals her. Personally, not only do I believe that Mariam’s mother had a huge impact on the mostly submissive and powerless person that Mariam became but I also believe that had the toxic environment that Mariam grew up around been reality, the woman would not have thrived in life even as much as Mariam did. When Laila is found amongst the rubble and ruins of what was her house, and Mariam has the opportunity to become a mother figure to Laila a change or awakening in Mariam’s character can be found. She now feels as if she has something to live for and protect in life due to her multiple miscarriages.

Laila’s relationship with her mother differed from that of Mariam and her mother. Despite the fact that for most of her life with her parents Laila was the only child in the house, she still felt over shadowed by her mother’s love for her brothers. Laila’s mother basically totally ignores Laila’s existence which really began to hinder her own purpose in life. If Laila could not even fill a spot in her mother’s heart next to her brothers, why was she alive at all? Laila asks herself this in the following quote: “people shouldn’t be allowed to have new children if they’d already given away all of their love to the old ones.” The quote proves from Laila, the toll that the absence of her mother’s love was taking on Laila. I also found it interesting that the situation was mirrored when Laila has her own children and finds herself worrying that she will not be able to love Rasheed’s child as much as she loves Tariq’s. Multiple times throughout the novel Laila introduces Mariam as her own mother and this is due to the fact that she needed to fill that own void in her heart that was from the lack of love and nurturing from her own mother, which Mariam could provide for her.

The motherly relationship between Laila and Mariam eventually reaches a place of blissful love and devotion to each other. At the end of the novel when Laila alludes to naming her next baby girl Mariam, the motherly bond seems to make a full circle in the novel. The absence of the motherly bond from their biological mothers actually pushed the women to become better people who were able to have better relationships than those of their mothers. Ii can honestly say that I like this result a lot better than what I truly believe the outcome would be in a situation like this in reality. I believe that the women would have in reality probably been bitterer about their lifestyles even if they only did what they needed to in order to survive, and this bitterness would have affected who they were. Despite these feelings my favorite line in the novel and the line which I find the most inspirational remains to be the following: “Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand splendid suns.”