Yea for knives. Nay for murder.
Daisy, as she talks about her daughter, says, “I’m glad it’s a girl. And i hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
When I first read this, I was confused by the strange way Daisy expressed her hopes for her daughter. Why would she want her daughter to become a fool? I became to realize this reason was the fact that she was female. Actually thinking about it, it’s kind of depressing. A woman like Daisy did virtually nothing at the time when this book was written. She has no motivation, dreams, and her life is pointless. Daisy hopes for her daughter to grow up unlike herself, who is aware of her pointless, unambitious life.
And this led to my question: can ignorance prevent depression? Is knowledge misery?
After some thinking, I realized I was being silly. This can easily be answered by both you and I. It is obvious we need our brains and knowledge to survive. We need knowledge. Then why is the phrase “ignorance is bliss” tossed around in everyday speech? Turns out, we need both knowledge and ignorance. We probably need to know how to use a fork and knife. We probably don’t need to know how if feels to kill someone.
Daisy does not want her daughter to find out about the meaningless life of a female, as she believes, she is living. Because if she does, realization may be even worse than killing someone.
Hi Sujin!
ReplyDeleteI love your post! As I was reading your post, I was reminded of the book 1984. Last year in English, we did lots of stuff revolving on the saying "Ignorance is bliss." Ignorance is something that needs to be controlled, it can't be allowed to spread rapidly nor can it be allowed to extinguish completely. If ignorance spreads, knowledge obviously lessens, and as you said earlier, "we need our brains and knowledge to survive." However, extinguishing ignorance completely can be harmful to our emotional state of mind. For example, some people hate having injuries described to them, they prefer to remain "ignorant" rather than being put out of their comfort zone. I think the important thing to ask ourselves about "ignorance is bliss" is whether the insight given by knowledge outweighs the emotional disturbance it causes.
I wrote about the same quote because it stood out to me too. It definitely is depressing because Daisy has no hope for herself or her daughter. I agree that we need both "knowledge and ignorance", and letting either one overpower the other leads to a negative impact on our lives.
ReplyDeleteIt is really interesting to me how you connected the idea of ignorance to way gender roles are expressed throughout the novel.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you pointed out that even though to us it definitely seems as though Daisy is limiting her daughter's future, she actually might be trying to protect her from realizing how limited she already is by society. Really nice post!