3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?
a few things i have to outline for myself before i can really answer this question:
mary swann wrote really intelligent, "deep" poetry. mary swann talked about intelligent, "deep" things to no one. mary swann showed no evidence of her intelligence and depth in her diary.
what bothered me about this aspect of the book is that all of the characters were so disappointed by the fact that there was no evidence of her intelligence and depth outside of the poems. they acted as though this meant that she must have been a simple woman who didn't really understand the magnitude of what she was writing. i, on the other hand, think that mary swann was probably an extremely intelligent woman trapped into a life of the mundane. i don't think that the lack of "proof" of her intelligence in the daily conversations she had with family members (um, hello, one of whom KILLED HER for whatever reason--she obviously wasn't very comfortable being herself around him) has any bearing whatsoever on the fact of her intelligence. while she only felt comfortable expressing it in one place (her poems), i have no doubt that her mind was every bit as intelligent as her poetry all the time--she just did not have inexhaustible outlets.
so instead of being disappointed by her life, her character, i suppose i was more intrigued and very saddened by the seeming incongruities between her poems and her diary/conversations with rose and her daughter. it showed me how stifled her voice and insight were, how caging her life was. i imagined a seething brain.
the murder makes me ill, obviously. i am kind of glad (this is me answering one of my own questions) that we didn't know more about it, as any "reason" for killing someone in a manner so grotesque isn't reason enough. any justification or explanation that shields could have come up with would have seemed like a cop out, so i am glad that she left us in the dark about it. the facts of it are all we had and probably all that really mattered: knowing why her husband did that wouldn't have shed any more light on the meanings or intentions of her poetry, as they transcended her human experience anyway. those details seem to be unnecessary to me, facts for sensationalism. which is what i considered m. jimroy's biography to be looking for: sensationalism.
no subject
a few things i have to outline for myself before i can really answer this question:
mary swann wrote really intelligent, "deep" poetry.
mary swann talked about intelligent, "deep" things to no one.
mary swann showed no evidence of her intelligence and depth in her diary.
what bothered me about this aspect of the book is that all of the characters were so disappointed by the fact that there was no evidence of her intelligence and depth outside of the poems. they acted as though this meant that she must have been a simple woman who didn't really understand the magnitude of what she was writing. i, on the other hand, think that mary swann was probably an extremely intelligent woman trapped into a life of the mundane. i don't think that the lack of "proof" of her intelligence in the daily conversations she had with family members (um, hello, one of whom KILLED HER for whatever reason--she obviously wasn't very comfortable being herself around him) has any bearing whatsoever on the fact of her intelligence. while she only felt comfortable expressing it in one place (her poems), i have no doubt that her mind was every bit as intelligent as her poetry all the time--she just did not have inexhaustible outlets.
so instead of being disappointed by her life, her character, i suppose i was more intrigued and very saddened by the seeming incongruities between her poems and her diary/conversations with rose and her daughter. it showed me how stifled her voice and insight were, how caging her life was. i imagined a seething brain.
the murder makes me ill, obviously. i am kind of glad (this is me answering one of my own questions) that we didn't know more about it, as any "reason" for killing someone in a manner so grotesque isn't reason enough. any justification or explanation that shields could have come up with would have seemed like a cop out, so i am glad that she left us in the dark about it. the facts of it are all we had and probably all that really mattered: knowing why her husband did that wouldn't have shed any more light on the meanings or intentions of her poetry, as they transcended her human experience anyway. those details seem to be unnecessary to me, facts for sensationalism. which is what i considered m. jimroy's biography to be looking for: sensationalism.