leanna1′s Blog

Everything in the magical world is colourful. Although some places in Hogwarts are sometimes described as dark and frightening, there are colours in everywhere. The wizards wear violet, green cloaks. When Harry went to Diagon Alley he founds many magical instruments such as potion bottles and globes of the moon which we can suppose are made of many different colors. The Nimbus Two Thousand is “sleek and shiny, with a mahogany handle, it had a long tail of neat, straight twigs and Nimbus two thousand written in gold near the top.” (p. 123). The Great Hall is decorated with torches and candles that lit and brightly illuminate the place. The tables are laid with glittering golden plates and goblets. The ceiling there is decorated with stars which we imagine are very brilliant because the ceiling is velvety black, putting the stars in the spot. Harry describes it as a “splendid place” (p.87). The food is also very colorful. The candies, the Bertie Bott’s Every-flavour beans, are of all sorts and colours. There are strawberries, chocolate éclairs, jelly, pudding; all different colours of food. The magic effects that the wizards and witches use are also very colorful as we see in the examples: “Hermione had performed a tricky little charm so that the paint flashed different colours.” (p. 136). “Bright blue flames shot from her wand on to the hem of Snape’s robes.” (p. 140). The balls used in the Quidditch game, except from the Bludgers that is black, are colorful. The Snitch is bright golden, the Quaffle is bright red. So, the magical world is much more colourful and brilliant than the ordinary world which is completely boring and without colour.

We can see in “The Lord of the Rings” that Bilbo is a hero. He is not the kind of hero that is physically strong. He becomes a hero because of his moral principles and intelligence. Bilbo faces all kinds of dangerous situations: goblins, spiders, etc because of a quest that Gandalf forced him to face. He went to the goblins tunnels where he met Golum, he had a dark and dangerous journey to Mirkwood and he risks his life in the Elve’s cave to help the dwarves. He has the ring that makes him invisible, he has the chance to go away and leave the dwarves alone to solve their own problems with Smaug. But, instead of cowardly leaving the dwarves, he decided to stay and face danger to help them. He didn’t use the ring for his own benefits, he uses it to help the company. Again there is the theme of making choices. Bilbo makes his choices, and by doing that he shows his good character. At the beginning, the dwarves didn’t believe Bilbo was a good burglar as Gandalf said. They called him “little hobit” “little fellow”. Then they started to respect Bilbo and they treat him Mr. Baggins. The dwarves recognized Bilbo was a brave man, a hero, after he chose to help them. The dwarves said that: they “wish he could have arranged a more comfortable journey” (p.194), but he decided to help the dwarves and go on with his quest. In fact, Bilbo is a very luck boy, but he is also very smart. His intelligence makes him elaborate strategies to overcome problems. So, what makes Bilbo a hero is his moral ethics that leads him to make good choices and his intelligence to find the right solutions for their problems.  

As the witch uses the deep magic, we can see that violence increases in the book. She uses a kind of ritual to kill Aslan. This scene is horrible and describes the cruelty the witch used to kill the lion. He suffers a lot, he had his mane cut out, and he was humiliated by all the odd creatures that muzzled, kicked and hit him. Aslan had a brave, humble and noble attitude while offering his life to be sacrificed in Edmunds’ place. By doing this he activated the Depper Magic that defeated the witch and evil. We can see good winning evil. The White Witch was sure she has won, and so the evil. However, the witch knowledge of the Deep magic is limited, and Aslan, who represents a God figure, has a bigger knowledge of it because he knows the Deep Magic before dawn of time, while the witch knows it from the dawn of time. In comparison, we see the idea that evil is limited and good is unlimited. By offering his life in sacrifice, Aslan puts an end to evil, bringing peace to everyone who is in the side of goodness. The Depper Magic brings hope in a situation where the evil seems to be impossible to be defeated. The feelings of sadness, desperation, and hopeless were substituted by hope and happiness, and the attitudes that made happiness possible were atonement, redemption, love to the other, humbleness, and renouncement.

Narnia is a world that is parallel to the real world. Although it is a different world, Narnia is a place full of danger. Some trees are spies, and children should take care for not been seen or heard there. Evil is presented in a realistic way. There is a queen who really frightens people and spreads terror throughout Narnia. She transforms people into stones: “but you’ve no chance of getting into the House against her will and ever coming out alive”. The characters in Narnia live all hidden and afraid of the Queen. Narnia is a desert snowy place where the horror made people to be isolated from one another. It is always winter there, and there isn’t Christmas. There is a lot of frightening and sadness in the book, and it is very realistic. The faun cries because he thinks he was a bad guy for “Taken service under the white witch” and for thinking of kidnapping Lucy. The kids become very cold and frightened in Narnia: “ I’m getting horrible cramped”, “I mean, it doesn’t seem particularly safe here”. Edmund feels lonely, cold and frightened walking alone in a dark snowy place that was not familiar to him. So, Narnia is a dangerous place that can really hurt and frighten the characters.

We can see that there is a lot of heartless and violence in Peter Pan. Every character in Neverland kills or does some violent action such as poisoning people, or fighting to each other: “and again came a death-screech and again a crow.” The pirates, the redskins, and also the kids fight and kill: “sudden death might be in the next tree, or stalking him from behind.” In the battle between the pirates and the redskins there was a massacre. The pirates killed almost all the Indians. There was also a carnage in the battle between the kids and the pirates. The kids killed almost all the pirates. Michael, who is the youngest of the kids (he is almost a baby) also killed a pirate.

Although the violence is present in the book, the characters don’t feel sorry about it, and are not horrified. The violence the characters see or do doesn’t make them think that it is an evil attitude. This happens because violence in the book is not faced as evil. It is only part of their adventure, it is not something real. They are playing a game, and killing is part of this game. When a pirate dies Slightly counts: one, two, three… as he was counting points in a game. I don’t think that the violence presented in the book makes the characters grow, because it is not shown as a conflict, but as part of adventure.

Readers also do not get shocked because the violence is presented in a sooth way. All the deaths, and the bodies are not described, the violence is not obscene. When the pirates die, the kids feel happy because pirates are bad characters, and also because the kids won the game. In conclusion, violence in the book is not realistic, everything is make-believe and violence is only a part of their adventure.

Wendy is presented as a very devoted mother. She does everything for the lost boys and also for her brothers. She tells them stories, she does all the housework, she cooks, she sews, and she washes their socks. Wendy is very tender, but she follows strict rules about the children. By the way, she had never seen the lagoon by moonlight because she had to put the children in bed at the write time (seven o’clock) and if they were late for bed, it “was all mother Wendy’s fault!” As we can see, Wendy represents the kind of mother that acts as a perfect housewife. She is always busy with the housework. She never does anything thinking on her own pleasure. She doesn’t have her own life, she lives only for her children. Wendy reminded me of my childhood. I was almost the same age of my youngest brother, but I was supposed to take care of him because “he was only a child”, and I was the responsible girl who would be aware of everything. It seems that responsibility is imposed to women since they are children. Boys are always considered innocent, fragile and crazy creatures that don’t worry about anything. Wendy is also a child, but she is much more mature and emotionaly stronger than the boys. She could have decided to enjoy the adventure and not to take care of the boys, but she chose to be their mother. It seems that she was prepared and “built” to be a mother as all good girls at that time were. Maybe that is the reason why she accepted the motherhood.

Neverland is showed in the book as a magic wonder land where there are beautiful places. It is “more or less an island” where there are astonishing splashes of colors, coral reefs, lagoons, savages and lonely lairs, gnomes, fairies, caves through which a river comes, rakish-looking craft in the offing. In Neverland nothing stands still. According to Peter Pan, it is the place where the lost boys live. These lost boys are the ones who get lost when the nurses are looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days, they are sent to the Neverland to defray expanses.  There are also mermaids and pirates there.

When Wendy asked Peter where he lived, he answered that it was “Second to the right and then straight on till morning.” It is a very strange address (nonsense again). So, there is not a real address for Neverland, because it does not exist in the real world. Neverland is a place that is built in the children’s minds when they are sleeping. It is an imaginary world.

 The three children in the book only “went” to Neverland while they were sleeping. It was always at night, when they went to bed and their mother lit the night lights. Then, the children dream they were in Neverland. But, in the imaginary world there is night and also day. It seems that only children can go there. I don’t think adults can get there. I think adults can’t go there because they don’t believe in fantasy anymore, and they do not have imagination like children do. They are too much worried about reality to let their imagination free to go to Neverland. Wendy, John and Michael had the fairy dust blown on them by Peter Pan, so they could fly and get there.

This chapter is full of nonsense. At the beginning, there was plenty of room to sit down and the hatter and the Hare said there was no room there. They offered Alice some wine but there was only tea (very funny). By the way, it reminded me a group of people who live at my hometown. They are called “dorados” because they descend from the Germans and they live in a kind of isolated group where there are many “casamentos consanguíneos”. Because of that, they have some physical and intellectual problems. This group is very interesting because they have a proper way of speaking. They invert the order of the terms in a sentence, so they say for example: “Tem, Maria, pão?” instead of “Tem pão Maria?” And the most interesting is that when ”Maria” answers: “Sim tem pão.” They usually say: “Então me dá uma rosca.” This is also pure nonsense, but people at my city understand that because they are accustomed to the way the “dorados” speak. I gave this example to show that, in our real world, this way of speaking may be considered madness, because it does not make part of our “social contract”. However in my hometown, although it is also considered strange, people got accustomed to it because there is a kind of “local social contract”. I think the same thing happens to Alice’s new World: things there are not logical, it is a crazy world, so the mad things that happens become an illogical logic because it is a nonsense that makes sense for that specific world (my God, I think I’m going crazy with this book, I am saying illogical things).

I made this comment before (maybe it was not proper) because these Linguistics issues that are related to the “arbitrarieradade do signo” fascinates me. The parts that I most focus my attention on in this book are the ones related to the language games. In this chapter there are many dialogs about this issue. The characters talk about meaning: ”Then you should say what you mean” ” at least I mean what I say” “The Hatter’s remark seamed to her have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.” They also say “much of a muchness”

As I said before, I will focus my speech on the Linguistics aspects, but I can notice that this chapter is all about mad things. Communication is mad, there is a clock that is personified and called “HE” and that shows the day of the month instead of the time. It is always tea-time there. We can see that Alice shows her politeness rules when she says that it wasn’t very civil of the Hatter and the Hare to offer wine if they didn’t have it. It was very funny because the March Hare replied immediately:” It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited.” Another crazy thing is that the riddles have no answer there. There is also school criticism when Alice thinks over what she could remember about ravens and writing desks, and she realized it wasn’t much. The parody of “Twinkle, twinkle little star” is very creative and fun: How come can a bat twinkle?

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