Here comes J - er, Mikaela!

First off, I hope you all enjoyed my reference from The Shining. Second - some of you may have noticed that I didn't really post last week. The long and short of it is that I was fangoriously devoured by a gelatinous monster named illness and rehearsal and have only recently been vomited back up into the world of school work. Bear with me as compensate for last week and post incessantly this week.

Those who've been reading my posts know that I'm writing about the constraints/liberations of time and so in analyzing The Winters Tale I decided to look specifically at passages about the seasons. Some things I noticed:

Winter is heavily associated with Leontes and his suffering. Just before Leontes accuses his wife of having an affair, his son gives the audience a precursor to the story saying, "a sad tale's best for winter" (2.1.25). Paulina also tells Leontes, "A thousand knees, ten thousand years together, naked fasting/ upon a barren mountain and still winter in storm perpetual, could not move the gods/ to look that way thou wert"(3.2.230-3). I took "knees" as a synecdoche for prayer, and then read the quote again replacing "winter" with "Leontes' suffering," which made sense and reaffirmed my thoughts on winter's association with suffering.

Summer, contrastingly, is more associated with Perdita and with happiness. When Polixenes first meets Perdita he addresses her, "a fair one are you - well you fit our ages/ with flowers of winter" (4.4.77-8). Later on in the scene Perdita says,
"Sir, the year is growing ancient,
Not yet on summer's death nor on the birth of trembling winter,
the fairest flowers o' th' season
are our carnations and streaked gillyvors,
which some call nature's bastards" (4.4.80-5). A gillyvor, according to a footnote in the copy of the book I was using, is a July-flower. Reading these quotes I saw Perdita as these summer flowers - hence her being a flower of winter (born during Leontes' grief) and hence the flowers being bastards (just like Leontes wrongly supposed her to be a bastard). This would also explain the parallelism between Polixenes defining Perdita as "fair" and then Perdita describing the flowers as "fair."

Leontes is characterized by winter and spends the majority of the play in anguish, and Perdita is correlated with summer an spends the play infatuated with Floriziel. Seasons are a manifestation of time, and in this sense time is a constraint, because each of the characters is constrained to joy/sorrow dependent on season.

...ok so obviously that needs some more development, but it's a start for one of the ideas in my paper!