In discussing writing issues on Friday, I used the metaphor of "reading against the grain" to describe how you might use your chosen concept as a way to gain critical purchase on your text. To read something "against the grain" (as you might saw a piece of wood) is to read it as if you are not buying into its grounding assumptions. It's not necessarily to reject the whole of a literary text or to respond negatively to it, but simply to come at it from a different angle than the author intended in order to gain greater insight into it. Reading against the grain does not presuppose any conclusions--sometimes it will make you see more of value to the literary work than you did before, sometimes it can lead you to the opposite view. In either case though, reading against the grain can give you greater critical insight into a literary work.
Here's a question for you to address with regard to Gray that goes against the grain of this literary work.
Gray's depiction of the rural peasantry is, on the whole (as a number of people pointed out on the blog) respectful if not positively laudatory. That said--is there anything patronizing in his attitude toward them? Would Duck and Collier regard this poem as true to their life experience?
Deadline: Monday (11/9), start of class.
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I doubt that Duck and Collier would describe their attitude to agrarian labor as "jocund" (27). In fact the opposite seems to be true. I don't think Gray is patronizing here, though. I think he's being misleading, if not deliberately so. It is not an abstract "Penury" that represses the "nobel rage" of the savage peasant (51). Nor is it their "lot" that forbids them from being Miltons or Cromwells. Rather it is a system of calculated exploitation that leaves the rural peasantry abject, impoverished, and forgotten. But for Gray it is irrelevant if his poem is true to the life experiences of the poor. His poem is a focus on their death, a death that is inevitable for rich and poor alike: even "the paths of glory lead...to the grave" (36). We are led to believe, then, that all are equal in death. Implicitly, we should forget the gross inequalities of life, chalked up primarily to fate. An elegy remembering the poor, even if their tale is "artless", is all that is required as proper recompense for their harsh life. Thus we are taught to take peasant privation in stride as a perhaps unjust but simply inevitable fact of life.
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