Biographical Introduction

by Mark Seiltz

A picture of me.

jonathon david hawkins

The man who would later be known as jonathon david hawkins was born in Hastings, Michigan, with a full set of X and Y chromosomes and was then raised in that same city. Being a rather stationary clan, the branch of the Hawkins family of which jon is the youngest has remained in the same house on 434 West Green Street for the past quarter of a century (leading jon to consider the move to that house from the hospital four blocks away to be the most significant in his short and brutish life). Watching him grow up, his parents remarked early on that jon had a natural propensity for reading, writing, and finding all missing things in the house. Indeed, such was his propensity that his father sometimes muttered darkly about cataloging his youngest son's fingerprints.

Despite his noted intelligence, it was not until jon left grade-school that he realized he was not a character from Treasure Island . With this new found individuality, jon left behind memories of sadistic lunch ladies and long afternoons in the principal's office to embrace the academia of junior and senior high-school. Participating in wrestling, football, and track, jon exercised both mind and body, modeling his adolescence on the lifestyles of the Greek Olympians. As jon continued in senior high-school, however, the academic world won out, and jon slowly began to leave behind his career as an athlete. Finding solidarity among the small group of comrades known in certain circles as "The D-Squad"-- a clandestine organization inspired by the works of Robert Cormier--jon spent his days role-playing and reading books like Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Stranger in a Strange Land in order to escape from the absurdities of secondary education.

One of the most significant turning points in jon's life was his discovery of the owner of Hasting's small bookstore, who let him sit in the corner reading novels and comic books. Hastings could barely support a privately owned business, much less an independent bookseller, so jon became an indentured servant there, exchanging labor for issues of Marvel and DC comic books. And anyone would agree after talking to jon that the hours he spent in that bookstore had a major impact on his animated personality as a child (at least after he realized he was not, in fact, that prominent character from Treasure Island ).

At St. Norbert College, then, jon shared his ability and intelligence as a member of the Independent Council and other similar councils, various, sundry, and more numerous than he cares to recall. His junior year, jon "won" the presidency of the campus independent group known as B.I.G. (i.e. he didn't run fast enough to escape the voters). Sharing in the group's creativity, jon helped to publish an aggressive weekly broadside entitled Up Your Bemis. As an Education major and a Language Arts minor, jon balanced his time between "wading through the treacherous education program," and participating in fund raisers, food drives, and basement "social gatherings." Avoiding any specific plans for the future, jon's intentions include "achieving escape velocity from SNC," and settling down in Madison, Wisconsin, living "fat and happy" for the rest of his life.

The essays in jon's portfolio illustrate his writing style as well as his personality. Performing a close reading of James Joyce's The Dead , jon discusses the use of light and dark imagery to symbolize Gabriel's eventual revelation that his marriage to Gretta has always been somewhat dishonest and anemic. Turning his mind toward more specific criticism, jon also applies psychoanalytic theory to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." He argues that Roderick's tri-part mind embodies the House as his superego, Madelaine as the id, and the Narrator as the ego. In his critique of Poe's story jon claims that it also reflects Poe's inability to reconcile his own deteriorating family situation.

Continuing, jon explores through feminist criticism how the main character of John Updike's "A&P" represents a microcosm of the sexist stereotypes prevalent in patriarchal society. Applying Berger's ideas, he claims that Sammy illustrates how men typically "survey women before treating them." Finally, jon takes an interesting look at how the role-playing game Vampire: the Masquerade fictionally represents Post-Modern society, and how the imagery offered through the World of Darkness relates to members of Generation X. Using a new historical approach, jon discusses how revisionist Biblical studies have influenced Mark Rein*Hagen's use of the biblical character Cain to appeal to members of the 13th Generation. Overall, the essays in this portfolio reveal jon's personal interests and also offer a good example of his ability to write literary criticism.

 

  ------------0xKhTmLbOuNdArY Content-Disposition: form-data; name="userfile"; filename="psychpoe.htm" Content-Type: text/html Psychanalitical Reading

Poe as Roderick Usher in "The Fall of the House of Usher"

A Psychoanalytical Reading

written by jonathon david hawkins

Public domain image of theHouse.

Suffering from a mysterious "acuteness of the senses" (Poe 38), Roderick Usher is a miserable man teetering on the twin precipice of death and insanity; it is only a matter of time before he topples over the edge. In presenting this ultimate demise of Roderick in "The Fall of the House of Usher," Edgar Allan Poe plays out his own internal conflicts on the public stage of a short story. Upon examination of the text against an image of the author, it is clear that Poe unconsciously uses the character of Roderick as his avatar. Poe's tale conforms to Freud's id/ego/superego model of the human mind, with the ego as the aspect that should act as the arbiter between the id's pull to pursue the pleasure principle and the superego's demands to follow the reality principle (Vesterman 53). The other characters in the story represent Poe's own tripart mind: the House as the superego, Madelaine as the id, and the Narrator as the ego. In this story, Poe not only plays out the conflict between these forces but also accurately predicts his own failure to reconcile his internal struggles.

One need only compare an image of the author to his description of the ailing Roderick to recognize Roderick as Poe's avatar in the story. Poe's is a much caricatured face, distinctive and memorable to anyone who has seen his portrait. This is why the passage describing Roderick Usher is strikingly accurate as a description of Poe's own face. Consciously chosen by the author or not, a great many of the features that Poe ascribes to Roderick are his own. Compare the descriptive passage to the photograph of the author:

Image of Poe with comparitivetext

A reader might well describe Poe's pale and somewhat sickly complexion as "cadaverous," and though his moustache makes it somewhat hard to confirm, one suspects that his "pallid" lips are also "somewhat thin." The two features of Poe's face that linger longest in the memory--his large, deep-set eyes and broad, intelligent forehead--are also found in Roderick's description: "an eye large, liquid, and luminous" and "an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple." In ascribing to Roderick a chin much like his own, Poe gives the reader a hint of the judgment he has already passed on himself, for he says that "in its want of prominence" it speaks of his "want of moral energy." It is very clear to a reader familiar with the author that it is Poe himself that Roderick Usher would see in a mirror. As physical evidence shows that Roderick Usher represents Poe himself, further analysis using psychoanalytical criticism will show that the other characters represent Poe's conflicting inner forces of his psyche.

The first of these forces that is apparent in the story is the superego, in the form of the mysterious "House of Usher." One of the primary influences in the development of a person's superego is the family (Vesterman 53). Representing the family of Usher itself, the House is far more than simply a mansion and its grounds, a fact demonstrated both explicitly and implicitly within the text. The narrator reveals that the "House of Usher" was "an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry, both the family and the family mansion." The manor has been passed down from father to son for generations of Ushers until family and property have become synonymous (Poe 36).

And Roderick, after composing a spontaneous poem chronicling the descent of the once glorious house into its present state, reveals to the narrator his theory that the home and its lands had an intelligence and life all their own, with an acute effect on the family. "The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had molded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him--what he was" (Poe 42). If, in the world of Poe's gothic tale, the family and the home were inextricably linked, then the degeneration of each were also linked.

Symbolic similarities between the House of Usher and Poe's own family make even more clear how the House represents Poe's superego. Poe was orphaned at an early age, separated from his brother and sister, and taken in by the Allans, a family strange to him (Woodson 5). With no true family or estate it might seem to Edgar that his father's family "had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch" (Poe 35). As a child Edgar was considered popular and promising by many and accepted by his foster father (Sinclair 42), yet he was lonely and unhappy, and as he grew older his relations with family grew as dilapidated as the mansion of the Ushers. This deterioration of family relations centered in great part around Edgar's relationship with John Allan, who had grown dissatisfied with Poe over time and never let Poe forget that he was living off of charity (Sinclair 50). Allan, other family members, Poe's colleagues, friends and others that he admired held a dim view of Edgar's lifestyle (Sinclair 53), so it is no surprise that these influences which composed his superego would be represented as a once stately, but now crumbling, manor.

Within that crumbling manor is Roderick--symbolizing Poe confined by the demands of his superego. Imprisoned with Roderick, Madelaine represents Poe's unconscious desires, his id. This use of a twin sister as the symbol of his id is appropriate and expected. Throughout Poe's life he was consistently frustrated by a lack of strong, close relationships with females. His mother died when he was three years old and he was separated from his brother and sister (Sinclair 28). Fanny Allan, the matriarch of his foster family, was a very sickly woman whose illness prevented her from being a "mother" to Edgar. Jane Stanard, the mother of a schoolmate and the one woman that he was able to attach such emotions to, suffered a period of insanity and died only a year after he had met her (Sinclair 55). This left Poe without any significant mother figure in his life.

In addition, at the time that he wrote "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe had not been able to establish an intimate love relationship with a female. His attempts at marriage to his first love were thwarted by her father; Poe wrote her letters of affection which her father intercepted. When he returned home from school he went to a party at her home only to find out that the party was to celebrate her engagement to someone else (Sinclair 72). Such tragedies were a common theme in Poe's life, and having been deprived of a meaningful relationship with any woman, it is not surprising that Poe grants Roderick (who is an extension of himself) the close sibling relationship that he himself desired. "I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them" (Poe 43).

In Madelaine, this closest of siblings, are found all of the confused desires and urges that stem from the id's insistent pleasure principle: the desires for love both maternal and erotic, and the need for a companion who would comfort, understand, and identify with Roderick/Poe.

It was those same elements of the pleasure principle that circumstance and John Allan, and others who helped to form Edgar's superego, kept always out of Poe's reach. Edgar suffered from this deprivation, just as Roderick suffered under the oppression of the mysterious intelligence that permeated the House of Usher. And this situation of gradual mental degradation is what a friend from happier days, the Narrator, enters into. The Narrator represents the ego, the sense of "I," trying to keep Roderick from going over the edge, to help him survive the struggle between the two pulling forces of the id and superego. But the Narrator was simply not strong enough. The House/superego, wins out and Madelaine, the id, must be buried because of it.

But she (and the urges she represents) won't stay buried, and Roderick knows it. He senses that she's still alive, sees the "faint blush on the bosom and the face," (Poe 43) but attributes the signs of life to her illness and screws on the lid of the coffin anyway, in an effort to appease the superego. This initial burst of self-denial isn't isolated, Roderick feels the pull of his id repeatedly after that, but ignores it, favoring the stronger force of the superego. He tells the Narrator, "I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them--many, many days ago--yet I dared not-- I dared not speak! " (Poe 47) Roderick is not surprised by his sister's, the id's, "resurrection;" he foresaw it long before hand, and most likely the consequences of her rising as well. One way or another the conflict would finally be resolved.

By entombing his sister before she is fully dead, Roderick shows the attempted repression of Edgar's desires by his superego before he had come to terms with them. And raising Madelaine to slay Roderick, the author unconsciously makes a rather dire (and accurate) prediction of his own failure to adequately resolve his internal id/superego conflict.

Works Cited:

Here are some sources available on the internet...

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