Had a mini-argument with my English teacher that left a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyone ever read Bartleby the Scrivener? It's a Melville piece once again attempting to be profound but only managing to be mind-numbingly dull. The titular Bartleby inexplicably decides he doesn't want to work...he would "prefer not to" as he says 10 zillion times throughout the story. Eventually he "prefers not to" live outside the office he works out, and when the business moves he "prefers not to" move with it, and when the new tenants throw him in jail he "prefers not to" eat and starves himself to death. The Narrator--his employer--shares the rumor that Bartleby worked in a Dead Letter Office before getting fired from there, and this was the reason Bartleby steadily went to his death.

A Dead Letter Office? Are you fucking kidding me? He gets depressed because some letters don't reach their recipients? I pointed out that I'm used to characters who are traumatized because they were abused and raped as children (yeah, thinking of YnM, what else is new) and she cuts me off with this:

"That's trite. That's cliche. [...] It sounds like something you'd hear on a talk show."

Okay, first off. The issue of child abuse and child rape is NOT trite and NOT cliche, and we can NEVER read too much about it--in fiction or elsewhere--because unlike DLOs and the emo bois who used to work there this is an actually important issue. I can't begin to count the amount of times Matushita botched, or as it would seem, deliberately sabotaged herself on the execution of this theme, but it is STILL an important issue that speaks on an actual social problem.

As someone who did suffer emotional abuse from her peers to the point of attempted suicide and understands how it wholely and almost irrevocably completely mindfucks you, I am EXTREMELY offended on a personal level. And I can't even begin to speak for the people I know who suffered worse than I did; I have friends and acquaintances who were abused by their parents, or who were sexually assaulted. I can't believe the flippancy with which my teacher dismissed our suffering as "trite" and "cliche".

Second off, being abused is a hella lot better as a character motivation than getting fired from a slightly upsetting job. Sure, Bartleby might be upset that letters that can't be sent are burned, or packages are sold at auctions to strangers, but that's no reason to fucking STARVE YOURSELF. The effect is beyond extremely disproportionate to the cause. Hisoka acts like a fucktard and I give him a lot of crap for it, but you know what? He's out there busting his ass trying to make something of a decent life for himself when he's the one who has all the reason in the world to plant himself inside the Ministry building and refuse to work, leave, or eat. He fails miserably but he's at least trying to be proactive. Tell me that Bartleby was gang-raped by his male relatives or served three tours in Vietnam before he gets to starve himself to death.

Speaking of cause and effect, my teacher also stated that the Dead Letter Office issue probably isn't even the real reason for Bartleby's depression, it's just the Narrator trying to make sense of the issue because "he's a man of assumptions" and needs to figure things out logically. (She also dismissed characters being traumatized by child abuse as trite because it's too logical; "I was abused and that's why I act like this").

How can something be too logical? Life requires logic. Things happen because other stuff happened, and tracing that line of cause and effect is what makes up a story. Fuck, she's assigning us a paper in which we have to compare and contrast, and guess what? That requires logic. Analyzing literature requires logic, otherwise I can say that Bartleby's real motivation was to mindscrew his employer; why? Because I say so. I'd get that paper back with a big fat F, and rightfully so, because that assumption is not supported by the text. If the DLO is given as the reason in the text, and it's not explicitly debunked, then the DLO is the reason.

And that's the other thing. It's not my job to give Bartleby motivation. It's Melville's. My professor seems to be under the impression that only showing the characters' actions without providing motivation makes them universal and doesn't "get in the way" of the reader sympathizing with them because so long as the reader recognizes the feelings, they can fill in the blanks and become closer to the story. Which is horseshit. Doing that makes the characters flat and uninteresting and ultimately unrelateble because we just don't care about them. Every person has their own story. We read books to learn about other people's stories. We don't need to read our own; we already live it. If the story is good, we'll develop empathy for others. If the sory's fantastic, we'll develop empathy and at the same time learn something about ourselves without it being spoonfed to us.

It's why I can't appreciate Louise in "Story of an Hour" or the unnamed wife in "A Sorrowful Woman". Why are they unhappy in their marriages? Did they have other dreams that were quashed, and if so, what were they? Was Brently abusive or condescending? Did the wife get pregnant out of wedlock and thus was forced to marry? They have no motivation, no stories; just random personalities and wants. They are all sizzle, no steak.

So similarly, if Bartleby isn't depressed because of the DLO, he's just some random guy causing the lawyer unneccessary inner turmoil. There is no justification to his existence, and it's not my obligation to do Melville's job and give Bartleby his reasons.

So in conclusion, my professor has gone down in my estimation, this class is a waste of time, and Matsushita somehow managed to pwn Meville.

In other news I don't know what to give up for Lent. Ideas?