Uxorial Use-Value and Marxist Marriages Evaluation of Women and Desire in The Beggars Opera - Literature Essay Samples

Though set in the underworld of thievery, John Gays The Beggars Opera codifies a set of Marxist sexual politics in which marriage stands as the great equalizer of desire and power. An often aphoristic overview of the traditional power struggle between men and women frames a world in which marriage reduces the wooers desire but raises his power by an equal degree through ownership as a husband. This commodity fetishism of the wife spurs, in turn, the external desire of potential suitors, restoring equilibrium to the scales of eros. I will argue that Macheaths eventual capture (disregarding his brief escape and ironically crowd-pleasing twist-ending) stems from the complications his insatiable desire, at the expense of an all-consuming greed, introduces to a capitalistic society based on indirectly equitable gender relations.Though the opera contains stereotypical evaluations of sought-after virgins, Gay moves beyond this pat system by exploring the source of their appeal in monetar y terms. Air V, sung by Mrs. Peachum, equates the virgin with raw, yet to be coined material: A maid is like the golden ore, / Which hath guineas intrinsical int, / Whose worth is never known before / It is tried and impressed in the Mint (I.v). Note the seeming contradiction in that tried means refined or purified; the virgin must undergo some sort of transmutation as she is debauched. The currency conceit, which threads throughout the opera, here is an example of what Marx calls the use-value of an object, which is, essentially, [T]he utility of a thing (Marx 421). The virgin is valuable, and her use-value high, because she possesses a heretofore unknown sexual utility. We can see how this leads to a trumped-up desire on her suitors parts: Virgins are like the fair flower in its lustre, / Which in the garden enamels the ground (I.vii). Again, Gay polishes the airs traditional virgin-flower metaphor with the monetary imagery of lustre and enamel.The heightened emphasis on th e virgins eroticization creates a tension between her purity and the inevitability of sex: If soon she be not made a wife, / Her honours singed, and then for life, / Shes ‹ what I dare not name (I.iv). In an opera that tosses around the words hussy, slut, jade, and every other permutation of prostitute, Mrs. Peachums abstention from the label for her daughter is a revealing gesture at this point (she has no problems tagging Polly with sad slut two songs afterwards). Furthermore, the passivity of the virgin‹be not made a wife (as with It is tried and impressed)‹exposes the threat of coitus against which she must guard herself. Along the lines of this anxiety, Mrs. Peachum stresses the financial particularity with which the virgin must choose her first mate: But the first time a woman is frail, she should be somewhat nice methinks, for then or never is the time to make her fortune (I.viii). Despite her apparent choice in the matter, the virgin remains a passive figure, defending her compromised virtue as a dark secret: After that, she hath nothing to do but to guard herself from being found out, and she may do as she pleases (I.viii). The implication is that there is no interregnum between a womans status as a virgin and doing as she pleases‹the first act of intercourse is a slippery, slatternly slope.How, then, does the virgin milk her beauty and actively raise her value as a desirable object? Polly is a shrewd flirt, currying Macheaths favor in exchange for material goods. A woman knows how to be mercenary, she tells her father. If I allow Captain Macheath some trifling liberties, I have this watch and other visible marks of his favour to show for it (I.vii). The contradictory language of ownership‹using liberties when her services are anything but free‹suggests that this is not simply use-value, but something else. Macheath bestows his gifts, as I wrote before, in exchange for sexual compensation from Polly. As Pollys metaph oric technique of coitus reservatus arouses and sustains Macheaths desire, her own value appreciates via his financial expenditure on her. Marx separates the notion of exchange-value from use-value and defines it as a quantity of pure labor:Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour, there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract. (423)What is now noteworthy and valuable about Polly is not the utility of the watch, which could just as well be broken, but the visible marks of his favor to show for it. In other words, that the net worth of Macheaths labor, the act of wooing and the work that accompanies it, is a tangible and quantifiable term. We can also assume that the labor of a lothario as Macheath is worth more, per hour, than a layman suitor s. Considering that an early definition of mark is the stamp or impress of a coin, then Macheaths visible marks (Marx?) become more than material gifts, but external signs of corporeal possession by monetary means (OED, 1.11a). Although Polly has, unbeknownst to her parents, already married Macheath and conceded his ownership, which I will later address, these are ostensibly (and once truthfully were) the rituals of courtship and must be critiqued as such.During the courtship process, the woman continues to absorb her suitors capital and increase her exchange-value. When Mrs. Peachum laments that she is sorry upon Pollys account the Captain hath not more discretion, Gay calls our attention to the fiscal pun as Peachum utters Upon Pollys account! twice (I.iv). The play on Polly as a depository of savings is clarified when Filch acknowledges that love comes with a price tag: For suits of love, like law, are won by pay, / And beauty must be feed into our arms (I.ii). When the suit ors desire peaks, and when the womans exchange-value reaches its breaking point (for no reasonable man would continue to ply his lady with gifts if it came to no fruition), she accepts marriage, becoming her husbands property and forfeiting her gains, as Peachum moans: If the wench does not know her own profit, sure she knows her own pleasure than to make herself a property! (I.iv) The legal union and possession, as marriage therapists are all too familiar with, usually quells the husbands desire as a typical push-pull antithesis, as Polly and Lucy express in a duet (one that applies to all relationships, but especially marriage): LUCY: If we grow fond they shun us. POLLY: And when we fly them, they pursue. LUCY: But leave us when theyve won us (III.viii). The possible pun of pursue on purse reminds us of the investment suitors are willing to make, and of which husbands may ignore. The eroticism of the chase of the virgin is gone, and the wifes exchange-value is restored to a us e-value, albeit one of a different composition, as Peachum observes: A good sportsman always lets the hen partridges fly, because the breed of the game depends upon them (I.ii). The wifes sexuality (even, one may infer, her genitalia), formerly the prime indicator of her mysterious use-value as a virgin, turns from stoking the mans desire, now absent, to the purely utilitarian (and narcissistic for the man, in that it preserves his name and blood) task of reproduction.Under her husbands control, the wife emerges as his commodity. Recall that the virgin was tried and impressed as a coin; Polly and Macheath both later refer to the tactile act of pressing in courtship. Polly announces that she was compelled to marriage When he kissed me so closely he pressed, and Macheath simply includes this in a list of directions for seducing a virgin: Press her (I.viii, II.iii). The visible marks of the husband become so prominent as to overshadow the rest of the wifes identity. Marx uses simi lar imagery in his classification of commodity fetishism: A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of mens labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour (436). The value of the labor, or what one might call the humanity, of an object is minimized in the face of the evaluation of the final product. Before marriage, a womans commodity fetishism was derived from her clothing, perhaps bought with the aid of a suitor, but independent from him: If any wench Venuss girdle wear, / Though she be never so ugly; / Lilies and roses will quickly appear, / And her face look wondrous smugly (I.iv). After the fetishism of marriage, however, other men perceive a wife only as a transferable (hence, the coin analogy) object of the husbands possession in what Marx describes as a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things (436). Who her hus band is and the labor/wooing he has invested, at this point, is fairly immaterial to other men, according to Marx: There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom (436). In a particularly telling quote, Mrs. Peachum backs up this notion: All men are thieves in love, and like a woman the better for being anothers property (I.v). The thrill of luring away a married woman is enough for the suitor, and his skyrocketing desire balances out the husbands discounted passion, who simultaneously compensates for his lost lust of the flesh with his tightened leash of financial power. In this roundabout triangle, everyone profits and loses in terms of power, if we take the presence of desire as a benefit to ones life: 1) The wife no longer has financial or sensual power within the confines of her marriage over her 2) husband, who has forsaken his desire for the power that comes with economic ownership, but this libidinous power is externally restored to the woman (since the husband is now jealous) by the increased appetite of the 3) suitor, who has lost his claim to any legal possession of the wife, who is now desired again by the 4) husband out of jealousy, until he again loses interest, and the cycle continues ad infinitum. For society to proceed orderly and harmoniously, the equation must cancel itself out, so that each player is as powerful after, as he or she was before, the marriage.How does Macheath upset this harmony, and how does this inevitably lead to his capture? His resistance to the traditional behavioral cycle as defined above is what denies him access to the staid safety a conventional marriage offers, one in which libidinous lack is compensated for by pecuniary profit. His carnal appetite does not leave room for a pragmatic main course; he gorges hims elf on dessert. In front of Polly, he sings My heart was free, / It roved like the bee, / ÂÅ'Till Polly my passion requited and satisfied his need for more flowers (I.xiii). In parting, he even draws a direct parallel between his love for Polly and a misers love for money: The miser thus a shilling sees, / Which hes obliged to pay, / With sighs resigns it by degrees, / And fears ÂÅ'tis gone for aye (I.xiii). His sincerity is quickly demolished when he later reverses this monetary analogy: And a man who loves money, might as well be contented with one guinea, as I with one woman (II.iii). He is not merely an 18th-century version of the reluctant-to-commit male as stereotyped by the modern sitcom and Hollywood vehicle but, rather, a man burdened (or blessed, depending on ones viewpoint) with an infinite scale of desire. While other men in Gays London follow the adage You can never be too rich or too thin (perhaps inverting the thin component for the times), Macheath would add o r have too many women. Since no woman can dampen his lust, none holds a distinctive place in his heart. When the Captain pleads to Polly Suspect my honour, my courage, suspect anything but my love (65), Gay alludes to Hamlets love letter to Ophelia . But Macheaths indecision is less like Hamlets paralytic oscillations than it is akin to Macbeths ever-ambitious grasp for more power by whatever means; it is the indecision of the narrator in John Donnes poem The Indifferent, who can love her, and her, and you, and you. Macheaths boundless reservoir of desire prefers the free-hearted ladies of the town to the maidens (II.iii). The prostitutes promiscuity is an obvious boon, but their deep-seated connection to money give them an additional appeal for Macheath. The prostitute is a self-reliant wage-earner (if we ignore her debt to her madam), allaying Macheaths conventional masculine fears of a dependent woman, financially or otherwise. The emotionally independent and indifferent pr ostitute also bears the seemingly paradoxical relation to a court lady, who can have a dozen young fellows at her ear without complying with one, as Peachum wishes his daughter comported herself. More important to the highwayman, the prostitutes in The Beggars Opera are all thieves‹kindred spirits with Macheath, to be sure‹who, combined with the selling of their bodies, develop as sexualized commodity fetishes of theft and commerce, in that they are represented by the handkerchiefs they steal and the sex they ply.This is irresistible to Macheath, and Freud might read his capital/material goods-fetish for the prostitutes as a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it by replacing their absent phalli with shillings or another physical manifestation of money (Freud 154). In Macheaths case, castration is giving way to a sentimentality (which sometimes seems to pop up for him) that leads to a regular marriage, one which would effectively kill hi s superhuman libido, much as the greed-fetishist Inkle fears his marriage to the Indian Maid Yarico will expose his repressed sentimentality in a popular 18th-century tale. But is Macheath truly so fixated on sex as to ignore money, as when he claims Money is not so strong a cordial [as women are] for the time? (II.iii) In fact, he loves gambling just as much, if not more, than sex. Compared to pursuing virgins and dallying with prostitutes, gambling captures the best of both worlds; it delivers the thrill of an unknown outcome or value of the former activity, while it is free of the emotional responsibility (except for payment of debt) the latter also disregards. Gay drops a hint to the sex/gambling connection when he has Peachum declare that daughters take as much pleasure in cheating a father and mother, as in cheating at cards (I.viii). Macheath would certainly agree, except that he probably takes more pleasure in cards, because he knows he can seduce any woman‹winning at cards still requires some luck. His luck runs out, however, when the prostitutes betray him, citing his dishonorableness: Cards and dice are only fit for cowardly cheats, who prey upon their friends (II.iv). This statement insinuates that alongside Macheaths distrustful life is a buried distrust of women epitomized by his resistance to marriage. Jenny Diver then takes up [Macheaths] pistol while Suky Tawdry takes up the other; to continue the Freudian motif, the women in the opera symbolically castrate Macheath, appropriating phallic power when his threatens to lure them all into his trap. If this logic seems specious, consider that in the previous act, after Macheath delivers his Hamlet allusion to Polly, he exclaims May my pistols misfire, and my mare slip her shoulder while I am pursued, if I ever forsake thee! (I.xiii) The male/female juxtaposition of pistols and the mare blends similarly in the ambush (the women seize the pistols, and they slip out from under Macheaths p redatory position), and for further linguistic evidence, note Suky Tawdrys spiteful explanation to Macheath directly after they take his pistols: Beside your loss of money, ÂÅ'tis a loss to the ladies. Gaming takes you off from women (II.iv, italics mine).Excluding brief moments of freedom, Macheath spends the rest of the opera fettered and in a cell. At one point, Polly even latches herself on to him, crying O! Twist thy fetters about me, that he may not haul me from thee! (II.xiv) Macheaths desire is finally and symbolically tamped down, and this is when she feels closest to him: No power on earth can eer divide, / The knot that sacred love hath tied (II.xiv). Macheaths poetical justice (III.xvi) of being hanged may as well be a lifetime spent in fetters, for his symbolic castration is not so much Gays comment on Macheaths immorality, of which everyone in the opera is culpable, but on his uncompromising sexual greediness in a society that functions only when the libido and th e purse hold each other in check. Whether this is an attack on Macheaths philosophy or on society at large is unclear, although the Beggars final statement, if not taken as parody, favors the latter: Twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich: and that they are punished for them (III.xvi).Works Cited:Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press).Gay, John. The Beggars Opera. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Ed. David McLellan. Oxford UP.

Relationship Between Managers And Managers - 1733 Words

Relationships amongst employees and their managers dictate the level of happiness each derives from the workplace. Communication plays a key role in the success of these relationships. Relations between managers and their subordinates are known as downward relationships. Relations between subordinates and managers are known as upward relationships. Relations between peers are known as lateral relationships. All of these relationships and the communication flowing between them are capable of contributing to the success of an organization as well the allocation of power and politics. Upward relations. Organizational citizenship adds value to the success of upward relations. Organizational citizenship is at its essence, the belief that†¦show more content†¦This behavior is recognized as benefiting of organizational citizenship, which this manager rewarded (DuBrin, 2009, p. 88). †¢This manager focused on rewarding group success. This increases organizational citizenship behaviors, an impression management tactic positively impacting interdependent relations (DuBrin, 20009, p.90). A manager within my organization ineffectively utilized upward communications be acting in the following ways. †¢He promoted competition amongst team members increasing self-serving behaviors. Members of his team found no benefit in helping their team members succeed and so altruistic actions rarely occurred (DuBrin, 2009, p. 89). †¢This manager rewarded employees solely based on individual performance (DuBrin, 2009, p.91). The result was that the strong employees stayed strong and weak never had a chance. Strong employees basked â€Å"in reflected glory† as an impression management tactic (DuBrin, 2009, p. 96). Downward relations. The leader-member exchange (LMX) theory is a theory based on the belief that there is a positive correlation between the quality of the relationships between a leader and their direct reports and the success of the organization (DuBrin, 2009, p.143). A manager within my organization effectively communicated using downward relations in the following ways. †¢She utilized authority to further the purpose of the organization as a whole (DuBrin, 2009,

English Coursework Never Giving Up Essay Example For Students

English Coursework Never Giving Up Essay Have you ever wished for something so much that you could imagine yourself achieving that dream and being successful? but you gave in despair Have you ever had that one aim that you believed that you could achieve it, but then you suffered with great pain that you had to deal with, when you realised that your dream had become nothing more than a failure? Have you ever woken up early in the morning and made lists of plans that you thought that would be achieving but ended up not completing? Today I will get out of this boring everyday bed lifestyle and for beginners go hit the gym, start eating the right diet, do all my courseworks and do everything that I have to do, because I cant take it anymore. I want to be someone successful in life and then after a hard day in school realising that you didnt achieve even one goal and you wasted the whole day making more plans that makes you more of a failure? I can guess that for many people the answer to these questions is yes, because everyone has passed through these disappointing moments, but the question that never goes away is, why do most of our dreams and plans become failures? I would assume that the biggest reason why this happens is because people like finding stupid excuses and they use the rule of I will do it tomorrow more than they should. Excuses are just reasons that weak people find to fail without trying. People need to understand that if you wish for something you need to fight for it. You need to see your objective as gold and your barriers as your enemies, like in a movie, you just have to be ready to confront all your enemies fearlessly, be prepared to pass through all the disappointments and pains that life put you into and the most important is to be strong and faithful and never give up. I came to England in 2013, I started school in year 9, and because I didnt know how to speak English at all, I thought that I would never be capable of being in the same level as somebody in the same year as me. I was so frustrated, I used to go home and cry because I used to think that I would never be similar to the students from my school. I didnt want to try and communicate with anybody because I was too scared of making mistakes, and I thought that my dream of living in England and speaking another language would just be another goal that I wouldnt be able to achieve. Everyone used to say You have to try otherwise you will never learn it or It takes time, one day you will get used to it, but I didnt want to listen, and I thought that another failure was coming in to my life. But one day I had to wake up and start fighting for my dreams to become true. It was hard, but I then realised that I could do it and nothing is impossible for those who believe in themselves. What does success actually mean? Well most people would say Success is the accomplishment of an aim or purpose or Success means victory. But is that the right answer for the meaning of success? Well, I think that there is not a wrong or a right answer for this question. In my opinion success is what you believe it is. One saying I found suggested that Excuses are the tools of incompetence, used to build monuments of nothingness. I understand that its hard to achieve your goals, but if you dont try, you will always be another dreamer. And is that what you want? If you want to be successful in life, if you want to be proud of yourself, then you have to start working hard now; it is never too late to follow your dreams and be who you always wished to be.