What we DID in Class Yesterday - Auden's "Unknown Citizen"

Many of you have been telling me of your fear of being looked on in public eyes. To ward off this fear, I invited one of you to read out a notice for a Theatre Performance evening. He did the job with excellent voice control. I hope to address this issue in each of my class.

But, more importantly we did a little Theatrical Act - when I asked someone to act out the part when Willy Loman, the tragic common man in the play "Death of a Salesman", gets into the car and starts the ignition key. This started the engine, filled up the chamber with Carbon Monoxide gas. Willy dies at his own "will", so that his family could claim the Life Insurance amount to pay off the mortgage on their home. Willy Loman is an example of how Consumer Economy destroys many lives who firmly believe in the forces in the Market.

Auden's poem "The Unknown Citizen" is an excellent example of how a Modern Woman is forced to live a life APPROVED by the Political and Economic powers. If they do not conform to these 'approved' ways, the citizen are simply ignored/destroyed/forgotten.

We can find a good example of this in the two other GREAT novellas of 20th Century - The Stranger and Metamorphosis. In both novels we see how two male protagonists are destroyed because they would NOT conform to the social rules. This experience is not so unknown to women - especially in the 19th Century. In that century, women started coming out of their domestic life and participated in larger social and economic activities. But, 19th C. was still a period dominated by male-centered values and chauvinism and that is why we see Women were repressed and ostracized for being brave and freedom-loving. Some of the best examples of how women were suppressed and how they took their own lives can be found in three novels - these have women as CENTRAL characters.

1. The Awakening
2. Anna Karenina
3. Madame Bovary