Oppression

I read four of Ibsen's plays (The Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder) and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart this weekend, and can easily recommend them all.

Ibsen was a wonderful surprise to me. I've always liked literature about early individual females rebelling against the oppression of their male-dominated societies (Chopin, Cather), and to find a man writing such things in the nineteenth century is great. His Master Builder also conveys quite a sense of the struggles and futilities of male egoism, particularly the battle against time and aging.

Achebe also used themes of male egoism to good effect, but I was particularly struck by his descriptions of the appearance of the white Christian missionaries and colonists. What clicked for the first time was just how devious white settlers have been, both in Africa and North America. It was not simply a matter of brute force and cruelty. What the colonists did so tragically well was to divide the natives, undermine their traditional senses of kinship, community and justice, and play the sides against each other. This can be seen equally well in America (e.g. the French-Indian War).

So far the literature project has been quite enjoyable.