Dot in the Sky (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dotinthesky) wrote2008-07-05 01:09 pm
dotinthesky) wrote2008-07-05 01:09 pm
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Mary Swann
Although these questions are for K., feel free to answer them too if you have also read Carol Shields' Mary Swann:
1. Of the four main characters, which one was your favourite? Which one was your least favourite? Which one would you enjoy hanging out with?
2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)
3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?
4. Sarah Maloney says at one point that women carry all their lives the "full freight of their mother's words." Can this be applied to Frances Swann?
5. Rose says, with relation to the Swann museum exhibition, that "the charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh." How do you think this statement fits in with the characters, Mary Swann's poetry, the book itself?
1. Of the four main characters, which one was your favourite? Which one was your least favourite? Which one would you enjoy hanging out with?
2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)
3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?
4. Sarah Maloney says at one point that women carry all their lives the "full freight of their mother's words." Can this be applied to Frances Swann?
5. Rose says, with relation to the Swann museum exhibition, that "the charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh." How do you think this statement fits in with the characters, Mary Swann's poetry, the book itself?
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.
no subject
The symposeum was really troubled by Swann's lack of "intellectual" books in her reading list, which is quite elitest and reductive of them. Why can't a smart person reading something that is not T.S. Elliot or Joyce? I agree with you that they made a lot of assumptions about her intellect based on very scant items that belonged to her. They forgot that the poems themselves were proof of her intelligence (if that proof was required) and that they should satisfy themselves with that and nothing more.