Viewing the Play 'The Roaring Girl' through Michel De Certeau's 'Walking in the City'

Middleton and Dekker collaborate to write The Roaring Girl, which concentrates on a real-life London woman named Moll Cutpurse. Moll was reputed to be a prostitute, bawd, and thief, but the playwrights present her as a lady of great spirit and virtue whose reputation is misrepresented by a small, convention-bound civilization. In the play, as in reality, Moll dresses in men’s attire, smokes a pipe and bears a sword representing a colorful and in the underworld life of Moll Cutpurse. She stood London on its head with her cross-dressing and gender-bending behavior, and illegal pursuits. Her defiance of women in this play is exceptional. Also, she is perhaps one of the only players to be scrupulously true to herself; some of the other characters display very hypocritical aspects. Such unorthodox and unconventional role, Middleton and Dekker implies, leads to her spotted standing. She is a roaring girl; An audacious and bold woman-about-town. But beneath this absence of femininity, is a courageous, high-principled woman. Moll interposes in the central plots and is associated in skirmishes with many of the characters, consistently showcasing her ability to stand up for the downtrodden and wronged. Therefore, Moll creates a 'third space ' that identifies her as importantly freed in her navigation of space and social relations.

The city is a nexus of social interaction. Humans originating from various locations all tangle together in the city. Louis Mumford characterizes the city as “a theater of social action,” where “man's more purposive activities are focused and work out…into more significant culminations.” The social actions occurring in a city connect and gradually culminate into a something that contributes to the fabric of the city. The interactions between people are no longer discrete events in isolation. Instead they come together to contribute something to the city, whether in the form of politics, architecture, or entertainment. The city provides a theater or playground for social action, and subsequently becomes a stage where the results of the social actions can be clearly viewed.

Much has been said about the development patterns that are found throughout towns and cities in North America. In the New York Times, a post authored by Vishaan Chakrabarti discuses the trends facing American cities in the article “America’s Urban Future (Chakrabarti).” This article talks about the ways in which American cities are seeing resurgence in their urban areas, and new population segments are moving into once blighted areas. In order to convey the changes occurring throughout our communities, Chakrabarti relies on ethos and logos to provide a foundation for the information, and effectively uses pathos to convince the audience that they should care about the subject in question.

“It got to be easy to look at New Yorkers as animals, especially looking down from some place like a balcony at Grand Central at the rush hour Friday afternoon.” (Tom Wolfe). “O Rotten Gotham” argues that New Yorkers are in a state of behavioral sink. It would not be long before a “population collapse” or a “massive die off”.

“Cities are not approached simply as forums for economic and political confrontations but as places rich with meaning and value for those who live, work, and play in and near them” (Borer 2006). People assign characteristics and personality to cities. These traits are assumed to be as permanent and concrete as the physical city (Borer 2010). However, like the characteristics of a person’s identity may change over time, the identity of places is fluid and dynamic (Borer

William Blake’s “London” is a poem not only aimed at speaking to the impacts of industrialization on a city, but also to the loss of humanity that is associated with the quest for the acquisition of material wealth and power. The mechanical nature of the city, and the darkness that seems to hover over and within it, is conveyed through the setting. The environment of Blake’s London leaves the reader in search of unfound salvation. The ongoing war between flesh and

New York, the city of dreams, has always been a city that gather people all around the world to fulfill their dreams. All the different racists, different religions, and different cultures have brighten the city of new york. It becomes more like a nation instead of a city. Colson Whitehead’s had mentions in his book Colossus of New York that there are “eight million naked cities in this naked city-they dispute they disagree” (Whitehead 6), which show us how diverse the city is. People in this city have their own thoughts and dreams because they all come from different places in the world with different cultural backgrounds. The uniqueness of each person causes chemical reaction between one and others, therefore competitions and disputes start

Cities are generators of economic life and source of changes in the world. Thereby, Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities puts into relief the role of cities on the social and economic levels, while denouncing the disastrous consequences of urban renewal programs. To that extent, in chapters 2 and 3, she discusses "The Uses of Sidewalks”, arguing that over all people need safety and trust in their city. Therefore, first she claims the necessity of keeping streets and sidewalks safe because they are the “vital organs” of cities (29). Secondly, she argues that the functioning of cities should be organized in order to foster human interaction in which “casual public

The play "Walking in the City" paints a lesson that may be applied to personal interactions. Leaders and influential people craft rules regulating social interactions and social norms that please themselves and create the sort of society that works best for them or corresponds with their ideals. This represents the view of New York that Michel de Certeau saw from the height of the Twin Towers. The city was strategized below him in topical and geographical structure; it was laid out in carefully constructed zones according to a detailed and highly thought out architectural plan. These were the endeavors of the architectural strategists of the City. Down below, however, a different scene was taking place. Pedestrians were meandering in and out of the outline, messing up the strategy and adopting 'tactics', or heuristics, that best suited their intentions and desires.

In recent discussions of walking the theme of urban walking takes precedence. Thoreau claims the city hinders walking. Through closer reading, I realized that although multiple writers hint towards an authoritative entity that inhibits walking; an escape option almost always presents itself. My own view holds that although there may be some exceptions, the vast majority of the lives of earth’s inhabitants are tethered to a city in one way or another. This paper will be supported to a point by Thoreau’s “Walking.” To clarify, people can still leave the city and enjoy the beauty of Mother Nature, but rather they bring a part of the city with them. Understandably “the city” has multiple meanings, especially against cultural backgrounds. In the

Mortimer describes it by approaching the city walls. Here you would take in the sights of the great gatehouse, “high circling walls, the statue of the King, the great round towers, and- above it all- the immense cathedral collectively impress you with their sheer strength” (Mortimer 7). This overall stop gives you “no doubt about the civic pride of the city, nor its authority” (Mortimer 7).

The cultural myths within this “concrete jungle” are prominent in this picture; and like most cultural myths, the reality is far more complicated than these ideology have made it seem. While the immense complexity of this society cannot be captured in a single image, this photo of Central Park and the outlying city shows us the cultural features that are not visible or not obvious from ground level. The rigid geometric shapes and lines of the buildings blur together to form a vast expanse of buildings that extends toward the outer edges of the photograph and the enormity of it all hints at the rich culture that resides within. It is simple to see how the city became known for being a “melting pot” demographic with its tightly packed structures. The tremendous culture as well as the cityscape seem to burst out of the picture and the sizable towers on the right seem to reach improbable heights. Similar to aerial photography itself, when the essence of what you want to capture

New York City can be described as an infrastructural flux, a back-and-forth conflict between its modern-day technological advancements and its architectural remnants. Its modern-day infrastructure – a fusion that bridges together different eras of technological innovations – plays an important role as a physical record, or contextualization, of how New York City developed into the iconic metropolis it is today. Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City uses the idea of functionalism to explain the complexity and intrinsic design of New York City’s infrastructure, especially the function of streets as the foundation for the rest of the city’s buildings and infrastructure and protection for underground facilities, such as New York City’s plumbing and electrical systems, and the subway system.

His first comprehensive city plan was La Ville Contemporaine (the Contemporary City) a project to house three million inhabitants designed in 1922. This was Le Corbusier’s first attempt to reconcile man, nature and machine (Fishman, 189). The city starts at the center with a transportation hub for busses, trains, cars and planes. Surrounding this hub there will be an organized cluster of 24 60-story skyscrapers. These glass and steel skyscrapers are cross-shaped. Each individual skyscraper is to be set within a large rectangular green space. The skyscrapers house the “brain” of the city. The city is beautifully geometric and symmetrical. Placing the skyscrapers in the city center reinforces the emphasis on capital as a means of creating a successful city. Because of the shape and mass of each skyscraper, they have more usable space than an entire neighborhood but also relieves density and congestion because of the organization (Frampton, 46).

The social theories that I find particularly insightful in the study of cities are the Durkheim and Weber classical theories. Durkheim’s theory argues that societies are held together by social cement known as collective consciousness, which forms a moral basis of team spirit. In contrast, the emergent society is characterized by change, complexity and demands division of labor among individuals in the society. According to Durkheim, complex societies gave rise to social interactions or moral density among individuals. Durkheim believed that division of labor arises from increasing moral density in the society. Consequently, cities arise from the need of people to remain in close contact with each other and to uphold collective consciousness (Bounds 7).