Voluntary Memory In Edmund Wilson's An Old Stone House

First, with the example of the farmhouse White writes “there was a choice of pie for dessert, and one was blueberry and one was apple, and the waitresses were the same country girls, there having been no passage of time, only the illusion of it as in a dropped curtain – the waitresses were still fifteen” (31). Describing in vivid details, White has the same vital experience in the farmhouse as all those other times in Maine for the month of August. The existence of the farmhouse demonstrates that the coordinates of the location are exactly where they have always been.

Jeannette’s story of “The Glass Castle” tells you about her adventures with her family as a child. This book is so detailed that is gives an idea that the story is mixed up false information, making her memories not very true. Rather her memories being bound with what she has heard over time. This theory of her memories being false may have been proven by Elizabeth Loftus.

In the story “Blue against White”, the author, Jeannette C. Armstrong, writes about a native girl coming home to her reserve after spending time in the city. The topic of memories is very apparent throughout the story as the main character, Lena, is reminiscing through most of it. Whether we like it or not, life always goes on and sometimes, there are things we don’t really pay attention to until it’s too late. Memories can help to keep the past alive and get us through some pretty tough situations. In the story, Lena thinks about her time in the city and how she got through it with her memories of the place she grew up in. Armstrong represents her idea of memory of the past in her text with the use of the blue door as a symbol, comparing

The Ramsey Summer House remains abandoned during those ten years, decaying slowly, groaning and weeping as it remembers the tenants it once possessed and the movements they made “how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again” (Woolf 1927, 339). The house bore witness to every breath and every argument; it absorbed fluttering eyelashes, clapped hands, and footsteps; drowned in laughter and in tears; the house was enraptured by the Ramsey’s and remembers them fondly as their images haunt its halls (Wisker 2011, 6).

In this passage of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the reader obtains a very in depth description of what the Walls Family home in Welch is like once they move in. The author is this text is conveying how poor of a state their new home is. Walls uses the literary element figurative language to reveal the state of their home to the reader.

Walls’ memoir opens when she is three years old, cooking hot dogs in her family’s trailer in Arizona; she subsequently lights herself on fire and ends up spending 6 weeks in the local hospital for severe burns. This is the first and one of the strongest examples of her parents’ neglect, but Jeannette stays positive about it and learns from her parents not to fear fire. Most of the Walls children’s childhood out west was spent on the move, something Jeannette loved; this is evident in a short conversation with her sister Lori: “’Do you like always moving around?’ Lori asked me. ‘Of course I do!’ I said” (Walls 29). Jeannette adopts a ‘it could always be worst’ mentality to stay positive, even as her father Rex Walls lost jobs, and the family barely had enough food to sustain themselves. Her attitude towards her father stayed favorable, while perhaps a bit naive, defending him against the criticism from her siblings; an example of this is her “’He does! I said. He brings in money from odd jobs’” when Lori announced their father needed to “start carrying his own weight” (Walls 78). Jeannette shares a special bond with her father as they embark on imaginary adventures such as Demon Hunting, and plan the Glass Castle, a glorious glass house Rex plans on building for the

Messages become shorter when passed from one person to the next. Memories can be modified to fit one’s personal social experiences (i.e., conventionalization). Memory is unreliable, sensory stimuli are not stored as is but are actively transformed by the brain for storage depending on individual factors such as personal relevance and expectations. The most essential information is better remembered, but what is considered “most essential” may depend on an individual’s experiences. This suggests memory does not function as a video recording, but is a highly complex process that is influenced by an individual’s levels of attention, motivation, expectations, experiences, emotional state, etc. It also suggests that memory is an active process that involves constructing narratives out of events rather than passively recording

The utilization of imagery accomplishes Wall’s motivation since it demonstrates exactly how terrible and undesirable her living conditions were as a child, which makes the completion all the more powerful when she depicts living in a delightful homes. By portraying the memories in a conversational tone and descriptive manner, makes the readers think like Walls and be propelled to overcome their issues in their own

A review of the house itself suggests that an architectural hierarchy of privacy increases level by level. At first, the house seems to foster romantic sensibilities; intrigued by its architectural connotations, the narrator embarks upon its description immediately--it is the house that she wants to "talk about" (Gilman 11). Together with its landscape, the house is a "most beautiful place" that stands "quite alone . . . well back from the road, quite three miles from the village" (Gilman 11). The estate's grounds, moreover, consist of "hedges and walls and gates that lock" (Gilman 11). As such, the house and its grounds are markedly depicted as mechanisms of confinement--ancestral places situated within a legacy of control and

A certain image, scent or sound can bring back moments that may have been forgotten. The speaker is astonished by the dreams she has of her mother. Her mother died very ill, the person who she was when she died was merely a shell of who she truly was. She describes her as “so much better than I remembered.” (Monro, 151). At the end of her mother’s life she could not hear her voice. She remembers her “mother’s liveliness of face and voice before her throat muscles stiffened [as] a woeful, impersonal mask fastened itself over her features.” (Monro, 151) In her dreams she was able to hear her mother’s voice again, opposed to the reality before her death. A mother’s voice is beautiful, and there is no other sound that compare to something as unique. Elliot writes “The unconscious sifts through memory, and then offers up details either strangely distorted or implausibly combined. As in art, as in story, dreams too, render experience metonymically.” (Elliot, 79). With time memories inevitably fade, but the dreams bring a sense of comfort and replenish the image of her mother. “How could I have forgotten this?” (Monro, 151). Heller writes that this scene “serves as a springboard from which the narrator launches into a story being told by her mother.” (Heller, 1). This scene leads us to the central conflict in the story of her mother’s life, and assists in understanding the conflict

Memory – what it is, how it works, and how it might be manipulated – has long been a subject of curious fascination. Remembering, the mind-boggling ability in which the human brain can conjure up very specific, very lucid, long-gone episodes from any given point on the timeline of our lives, is an astounding feat. Yet, along with our brain’s ability of remembrance comes also the concept of forgetting: interruptions of memory or “an inability of consciousness to make present to itself what it wants” (Honold, 1994, p. 2). There is a very close relationship between remembering and forgetting; in fact, the two come hand-in-hand. A close reading of Joshua Foer’s essay, “The End of Remembering”, and Susan Griffin’s piece, “Our Secret”, directs us

Loftus and Palmer support the reconstructive memory hypothesis. They believe that information gathered at the time of an icident is

Before considering whether or not memories affect our reality, it may be useful to offer a definition of the term ‘reality’. If we are to

“The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”(Roosevelt). Memories are a phenomenon that brings both good and bad thoughts of the past back into one’s reality. This comes to show that an individual is a product of her past but is not a prisoner of it, due to it being her history and not her present. Margaret Atwood speaks in her poem, “Morning in the Burned House”, as a child who is reliving her past, although, that is perceived to her as her reality and she becomes a prisoner of that memory. This poem illustrates the message that the past is not one’s reality in that moment; it is history that tends to repeat itself in one’s mind. In this poem, Atwood expresses her thought and message through the specific imagery she uses of the five senses and the fire. Atwood uses the five senses imagery as a way to make one feel as if she is beside the child, reliving that memory with her. She uses the fire imagery as a way to set the tone for the poem, that perhaps something bigger and more life changing happened to the child. As well, Atwood uses the theme of illusion versus reality as a way to portray what is the child’s truth and what is a memory.

Proust continues his illustration of the importance of memories though their connection to habit. We all have the need for a certain order in our lives. The protagonist however (although not quite an obsession) does seem to have problems functioning in the absence of routine. The author's intention is revealed through Marcel's character, calling to our attention the true nature of a magic part of human life. That is, that objects themselves cannot be labeled 'familiar'--they need a human connection to be described as such: