Ayşe ÇELİK, Selin AYCIL, Simge ŞAHİN

Ege Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi İngilizce Öğretmenliği Tezsiz Yüksek Lisans Bölümü. Bornova/İZMİR

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to observe the role of games in language learning process in an Anatolian High School from the perspective of students. 2 different types of motivating word games were practised in classes, the students’ reflection and reactions  towards these activities were evaluated during the project period.  A total of 56 9th grader students from 2 different classes in İzmir Bornova Anatolian High School participated in this study. The data were gathered by 3 open-ended questions. The findings indicated that, 80 percent of the participant students who agreed upon using games in English classes showed the degree of their satisfaction towards games practised. However 20 percent of participant students would rather continue their learning process with classical methods. This can be explained by changing student motivation and perceptions of learning.

Key Words: Learning, games, Anatolian High School students

ANADOLU LİSESİ ÖĞRENCİLERİNİN BAKIŞ AÇILARINA GÖRE DİL ÖĞRENİMİNDE OYUNLARIN ROLÜ

Özet

Bu araştırmanın amacı, bir Anadolu Lisesinin öğrencilerinin bakış açıları doğrultusunda İngilizce öğreniminde oyunların rolünü incelemektir. Proje süresince iki farklı motive edici kelime oyunu sınıflarda uygulanarak, öğrencilerin bu aktivitilere gösterdikleri tutum ve öğrenciler üzerinde bıraktığı etki incelenmiştir. Bu bağlamda İzmir Bornova Anadolu Lisesi’nde öğrenimini sürdüren , 2 ayrı sınıfta 9. sınıf öğrencisi olan 56 kişi araştırmaya katılmıştır. Veriler, 3 açık uçlu soru çerçevesinde elde edilmiştir. Elde edilen bulgulara göre, katılan öğrencilerin yüzde 80’i İngilizce öğrenimi süresince sınıfta uygulanan oyunlardan duydukları memnuniyeti belirtmişlerdir. Ancak, katılan öğrencilerin geri kalan yüzde 20’lik kısmı, İngilizce öğrenim süreçlerine klasik yöntemlerle devam etmeyi tercih ettiklerini ifade etmişlerdir. Bu durumun değişen öğrenci motivasyonu ve öğrenme algısından  kaynaklandığı söylenebilir.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Öğrenme, oyunlar, Anadolu Lisesi öğrencileri

1. Introduction

Language education is a process in which teaching and learning of a language is eventuated. It can include improving a learner’s proficiency of native language, but it is more commonly used with the term of second language acquisition. The study of modern languages did not become a part of the curriculum of European schools until 18th century. Students of second languages did same kind of exercises including grammatical rules and translating abstract sentences with the academic study of Latin. Oral practises were at minimum, and instead students were asked to memorise grammatical structures and apply these to written texts in the target language. This method became known as ‘grammar-translation method’. Reform in foreign language teaching began in 19th century and changed rapidly in 20th century. It led to a number of different and conflicting methods, each trying to be a major improvement over the previous or contemporary ones.

Those looking at the history of foreign-language education and the methods of teaching in 20th century might think it as a history of failure. Not many students in universities having a foreign language as a major are able to reach something as professional proficiency. Even the reading knowledge required for a PhD degree can only be compared to what second-year language students read and only some of the native English speaker researchers can read and information written in languages other than English. However, earlier evidence for successful second or foreign language learning is easy to find, leading to a conflict between these cases and the failure of most language programs, which helps make the research of second language acquisition filled with strong emotion. Older methods and approaches such as the grammar translation method or the direct method are dismissed and even mocked when newer methods and approaches are invented and promoted as the only and complete solution to the problem of the high failure rates of foreign language students.

Most of the books about ELT including various methods that have been used in the past, often end with the author’s new method. These new methods are usually related to author’s own ideas, as the authors generally do not depend on what has been done before and explain how it relates to the new method. For example, some linguists claim that there have been no scientifically-based language teaching methods before their works. On the contrary, there is significant evidence. It is generally stated that older methods have been completely ineffective or have been disapperared when even the oldest methods are still used. One reason for this situation is that supporters of new methods have been completely sure that their ideas are totally new and correct so they could not accept that the older ones have enough evidence to create controversy. That has been in turn caused by emphasis on new scientific findings, which has tended researchers to ignore priors in older work. By presenting the long history of ideas, debates and methods, some perspective on the theories being discussed above can be achieved, and by taking  them away from the context and personalities associated with them now can also let one look at them in a rational way.

When we come to the point of using games in teaching a foreign language, we see each method and approach have different ratios. For instance, while games are not used in the Grammar-Translation Method, Silent Way and Direct Method, in the Audio-lingual Method they are just used for teaching grammar. On the other hand, in the Communicative Language approach authentic materials, scrambled sentences, picture strip stories and role plays are types of games used in this teaching process. It is also stated that the games used in Suggestopedia and Natural Approach keep the students relaxed and comfortable. However, language learning is a hard and frustrating process. It requires constant effort to understand, produce and manipulate the target language. Well-chosen games are of big importance as they provide intense and meaningful practice of language. Games stimulate motivation since they are amusing and at the same time challenging. Furthermore, they employ meaningful and useful language in real contexts with authentic communicative practices.They encourage and increase cooperation. It is a common perception that all learning should be serious and unique in nature, and that if one is having fun then it is not really learning. Yet, it is possible to learn a language and at the same time enjoy the process. Many researchers and writers have claimed that games are not just time-filling activities but have a great educational value. Most of the games make learners practice the language instead of concerning about the grammatical rules or structures. “If games are seen as a framework for providing a meaningful context for language acquisition then games should be understood as significant models for design of educational material for language teaching and learning” [1].

1. 2.      Purpose

The following questions are aimed to be answered by the results of the three open-ended questions :

   - What is the role of games in learning process in Anatolian High School classes? 

   – Do games affect students’ perception of second language learning ? 

   – What are the advantages and disadvantages of using games in the learning / teaching language process ?

   – How do they motivate or demotivate the students in learning a new language ?

   – Do the games provide intense and meaningful practice of language ?

   – By games, are the students able to use meaningful and useful language in real context ?

   – Is it possible to learn language while enjoying oneself at the same time ?

   – Is it just for fun or waste of time or is it an important factor making improving learners’   communicative competence ??

   – How do the games make the four skills of the students during English classes ?

   – How do the games create class cohesion, healthy competition and whole class participation ?

1. 3.      Method

      3.1. Participants

In this study, participants are chosen from students who are 9th graders in Izmir Bornova Anatolian High School. The avarage age of participants are between 14 – 15. The total number of participants is 56, consisting of 30 female and 26 male from two different classes. 24 of them have private primary school background while 32 of them have public primary school backgorund.

3.2. Data Gathering

The answers of 3 open -ended questions which are directed to 56 9th grader students are used for gathering data.  The questions are :

      1) What do you think about the game we used in the classroom ? Was it useful for you to learn / memorize the vocabularies or not ?

      2) Did the games used during your English classes increase your interest or motivate you; or do you see them as boring exercices ?

      3) After being taught with games ; now do you prefer to play games or continue your classes with classical methods while learning English ?

      3.3. Practice

Two different games are practised in both classes to evaluate the effect of games on students in English learning process. The is first game is “Hangman” in which one player thinks of a word and the other tries to guess it by suggesting letters. The word to guess is represented by a row of dashes, giving the number of letters. If the guessing player suggests a letter which occurs in the word, the other player writes it in all its correct positions. If the suggested letter does not occur in the word, the other player draws one element of the hangman diagram as a tally mark. The game is over when the guessing player completes the word, or guesses the whole word correctly and the other player completes the diagram. The second one is a‘‘Word Game’’ which is spoken or a board game often designed to test ability with language or to explore its grammatical structure. During the game process, vocabularies -given by the teacher- are written on colorful cards with clue words written below. The class is divided into 3 groups and given names by the students themselves. Every group chooses a volunteer student to pick up a card from the deck and act out the written word by gestures to his/her group. If the group can not guess the word in one and a half minute, the turn comes to the other groups and they try to find out the hidden word. In the end, who guesses the word and say also its meaning in Turkish gets points. The game goes on in turn till the time is up and the winner is declared.

At the end of the game application process, in order to get the feedback, the students were handed out forms consisting of 3 open-ended questions and were expected to answer them according to their own perspectives. Before the hand outs, the participants were asked not to put their names but just their genders and educational backgrounds which were only be used for the sake of the project. The importance of the survey for the aim of the study was stressed out. The gathered personal information was based on the principle of confidentiality. The duration of the descriptive analysis was 15 minutes.

       3.4. Data Analysis

The answers of the open-ended questions were analyzed by 3 researchers. The answers were catagorized according to the gender and educational background of the participants.

According to gender: 76 percent of female participants agree upon the benefits of the games during the English learning process while 24 percent of them disagree with the other female participants. 84 percent of male participants prefer games in their English classes while 16 percent of them are not in the same opinion with the rest of the male participants.

According to educational background: 42 percent of participants with private primary school background agree upon the benefits of the games during the English learning process while 58 percent of them disagree with the others. 57 percent of participants with public primary school background prefer games in their English classes while 43 percent of them are not in the same opinion with the rest.

In total, 80 percent of all participants prefer games in their English learning process. On the contrary, 20 percent of all participants do not see the games as motivating but boring exercises.

1. 4.      Findings and Comments

The findings are classified and interpreted under the titles of  “Gender” and “Educational Background”.

4.1.  Gender

Different reactions and perceptions from female and male participants towards the activities are evaluated during the application and analysis process. It is obvious that female and male students learn differently. This estimation has been regarded as one of the prior topics of the educators for years. From childhood female and male characters are shaped according to the roles which are imputed by the norms of the society that they are a part of. Even in babyhood, boys and girls differ in the games and toys they choose to play with. Boys prefer cars while girls prefer playing with dolls. In other words, girls are seen playing reality-based games like ‘playing house’  while boys tend to play with harsher ‘blood and thunder games’ that requires physical effort and supremacy on each other. In his book Boys and Girls Learn Differently! author Michael Gurian highlights the latest findings in neuroscience and explains the way brain-based differences affect boys and girls. He says that ‘‘Female brains mature faster than male brains, girls communicate verbally better than boys, boys are more spatial, girls tend to be social, and boys tend to manage social energy through dominance or pecking order’’ [2]. On the other hand, some researchers stand against the idea of Gurian’s social analysis, point out gender distinctions and have redefined them. In other words, it is possible to find girls who like climbing trees and playing basketball as well as boys who choose fantasy play over wild and agressive play. Based on the evidence above, in this study the changing role of gender is stressed out. The findings point out that female and male students might have similar opinions over the ‘same’ topic. As in this project, female and male participants who prefer to continue their English learning process via games are equal in number.

4.2. Educational Background

According to the common belief, private schools are believed to serve better  educational curriculums than public schools. Moreover, opportunities of private schools in terms of financial sources – native speaker foreign language teachers, trips abroad, classroom equipments- and course durations- extra foreign language classes- are claimed to be superior to public schools. Based on this evidence, students coming from private schools are believed to have a better educational  background in foreign languages as English. Accoding to this belief, in terms of their English levels participants with private school background are thought not to give same reactions towards games practised in learning process as participants with public school background do. As students with higher English levels are believed to get bored easily while playing games. However, in this study the findings proves that students whether with public or private school backgrounds have the same level of enthusiasm and curiosity towards games practised. Participants from both backgrounds who prefer to continue their English learning process via games are almost equal in number.  

1. 5.      Conclusion and Suggestions

In this study, the role of games in English language learning process was aimed to be observed. With this idea in mind, 2 different games were applied to 9th grader Anatolian High School students. During the game application process, the participants’ reactions were observed. At the same time students’ different perceptions of learning were evaluated. Also their educational backgrounds and gender differences were taken into consideration. After the game application process, the students were directed 3 open-ended questions and expected to answer them according to the games practiced in the classroom. Based on the results, it was founded out that the students were motivated and their interest increased by the games practised in the class while it was seen as a useful tool for memorizing vocabulary. Competitive atmosphere among students was also created. And with the final results, it was proved that the majority of students prefered to continue their English education with games. The reasons for that could be expounded as follows:

-         Games are fun and children like to play them. Through games children experiment, discover, and interact with their environment.

-         Games add variation to a lesson and increase motivation by providing a plausible incentive to use the target language. For many children between four and twelve years old, especially the youngest, language learning will not be the key motivational factor. Games can provide this stimulus.

-         The game context makes the foreign language immediately useful to the children. It brings the target language to life.

-          The game makes the reasons for speaking plausible even to reluctant children.

-         Through playing games, students can learn English the way children learn their mother tongue without being aware they are studying; thus without stress, they can learn a lot.

-         Even shy students can participate positively [3].

Besides these advantages mentioned above, there are some criticism towards the using of games in language learning process which is also observed in this research. %20 of the participant students agree that games are not serious teaching materials but just for having fun. Games are considered as unnecessary tools which are not serious enough to be used in the classes. From the negative findings of this research, it can be said that games create difficulties for the teacher to keep the classroom management well. With many number of students, it becomes harder to keep the control of the whole class while language games are being practiced. %20 of the participant students are in the same opinion that games could be useful just for learning vocabularies but not for the whole learning process. Even though most of them observe games as motivating and encouraging; they still want to go on their English courses with classical methods rather than new phenomenon of using games. It is also claimed that games are time consuming activities that are not useful for teaching English. More time is needed to prepare and practice the games in teaching period.  With time constraint, teachers may have difficulties of applying games during their teaching periods. On the other hand, students think that games limited with a few hours may not be helpful for them to learn English. Moreover they may lose their language awareness while going into details of games. Even with these criticisms, none of the students claim that games should be fully removed from the teaching and learning process. There are still a high number of students who support the using of games in language learning process.

From the outcomes of the research which proves the benefits of games on students’ learning process, it can be suggested that educators should use games in teaching a foreign language. As it is known, it is necessary to keep students motivated and positive during their classes to make the learning process more efficient. In order to get the attention of the students, teachers should use games with new methods and approaches that can improve four skills of the students and their communicative competence. English as a foreign language is not only important for the classroom period but also for the real context of life into which students get the chance of applying their knowledge. Compared with the classical methods letting students be less active in the classrooms, games create class cohesion and whole class participation during the teaching process. Observations during the research show that language games provide intense and meaningful practice of language. As a result, “Games encourage, entertain, teach, and promote fluency. If not for any of these reasons, they should be used just because they help students see beauty in a foreign language and not just problems that at times seem overwhelming” [4].

References

[1]  Sørensen, Birgitte Holm and Bente Meyer. ‘‘Serious Games in Language Learning and                     Teaching – a theoritical perspective.’’ Website Article. 2007.

<http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07312.23426.pdf>

[2]  Morgan, Linda. ‘‘How gender affects learning.’’ Website Article. 1 September 2007.

<http://www.parentmap.com/gradeschool-through-highschool/how-gender-affects-learning>

[3]  Mei, Yin Yong and Yu-jing, Jang. ‘‘Using Games in an EFL Class for Children.’’ Website Article. 2000.

<http://www.teflgames.com/why.html>

[4]  Uberman, Agnieszka. ‘‘The Use of Games For Vocabulary Presentation and Revision.’’ Website Article. January – March 1998.

<http://www.teflgames.com/why.html>

Works Consulted

Pica, Teresa. Berducci, Dom. Holliday, Lloyd. Lewis, Nora. Newman, Jeanne. “Language Learning Through Interaction: What Role Does Gender Play?”.  <http://www.wpel.net/v6/v6n1Pica_etal1.pdf>

Power, Ted. “Approaches and Methods in Second Language Teaching.” English Language Learning and Teaching.  <http://www.btinternet.com/~ted.power/teflindex.htm>

Vernon, Shelley. Teaching English Games. <http://teachingenglishgames.com/>

“Language Education.” Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. 14 May 2010 at 20:50.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_education>

“English Language Teaching Methodology.” English Raven.

http://www.englishraven.com/methodology.html

            Before searching for a certain answer of that question, we have to take a deep look over the term identity, its effects on people actually, on the ones who live in a society in which they are not accepted and abused at all. Our concern here is of course, the second and third generations of the first immigrants who came to Britain as a result of its colonial past or their dreaming it as a land to where ‘‘if only they make their way, they will never remain poor’’ (Lahiri 204). By that aspect, it reminds us all the well known ‘American Dream’. Anyway, these immigrants never felt like at home in Britain neither their children have the sense of being a ‘British’ still. And that is the point from where ‘identity crisis’ emerges. Identity can be defined simply as ‘the essence of a self-conscious person that makes him or her unique not only in the country he/she lives but on the whole universe’. But unfortunately, when the term comes to discrimination, it does not count for something at all…

            That discrimination starts at schools from childhood. Because they are ‘colored’ they are seen as different from the other children, from the white ones. Usually, it is started by an adult; by the teacher himself. As Hanif Kureishi whose nationality in heritage is Pakistani says; ‘‘At school, one teacher always spoke to me in a ‘Peter Sellers’ Indian accent. Another refused to call me by my name, calling me Pakistani Pete instead’’ (Kureishi 73). That ‘seen apart’ is later taken over by the children, by their classmates who are in origin White Anglo Saxons. Although these children are so little to become aware of the racial differences between them and their ‘colored’ friends, the adults around them like their parents or teachers make them also feel by this way; feel like they are superior to them. The sense of ‘pride’ strikes its roots in these little brains from childhood and leading them to be grown as racists. Andrea Levy who is a Jamaican in origin also shared the same discrimination with Hanif Kureishi when she was a child. In her article; ‘This is My England’ she says; ‘‘They asked – oh, they asked all the time. ‘Where are you from?’ was as constant a noise as a ticking clock. But if I answered ‘Jamaica’, lips would curl or tongues would tut’’ (Levy 2). Apart from that, she also tells the changing attitudes of the whites towards the ones coming from a well known superior country, explicitly in terms of her childhood remembrance; ‘‘America was a great place to come from. I remember a white American girl coming to school…Everyone wanted to be her friend. To see her toys, to hear her parents’ wonderful accent, to try their food with an ‘Ooohh isn’t it lovely’ ’’ (Levy 2).

            As we see from the first hand experiences of both writers, that ‘sense of loss’ is disposed in their minds, in their lives  at a very early age even if they accept Britain as their mother country. ‘‘I was educated to be English. Alongside me- learning, watching, eating and playing- were white children. But those white children would never hate to grow up to question whether they were English or not’’ (Levy 2). Taken apart from a group caused them be ashamed of their origins even of their parents, families and their cultural heritage. ‘‘I was embarrassed that my parents were not English. One of the reasons was that no one around me was interested in the country my parents came from. To them, it was just a place full of ‘inferior black people’ ’’ (Levy 2). ‘‘I wanted just to fit in and be part of everything that was around me, and these strange parents were holding me back’’ (Levy 2). ‘‘From the start I tried to deny my Pakistani self. I was ashamed. It was a curse and I wanted to get rid of it. I wanted to be like everyone else’’ (Kureishi 73).

            However; with the increasing numbers of new comers to the mother country; Britain, they started to gain the confidence in themselves again. Becoming more in majority made them feel like a part of something, feel like being accepted as they used to be. Thus, they started to be curious about their origins, their cultures and anything traditional in their home lands although they all hated once. ‘‘Along with this immigration – this safety in numbers- came a new interest for me in the country my parents had left. I was gaining a fledgling sense of pride in having a Jamaican heritage’’ (Levy 3). While trying to be a part of something, they continued to face with difficulties. In every research back to their origins, there was something missing, something lost, uncertain which caused them turn to the beginning where they left all racial thoughts behind; again the same feeling of belonging or unbelonging- where to belong? ‘‘It is hard for anyone to research their genealogy; but it is even harder (though not impossible) for someone with my background. Most of the records are incomplete or unavailable at best; destroyed or non-existent at worst’’ (Levy 3).

            Identity crisis rose from discrimination or racism, what you wish to call as, went on making ‘colored’ people’s lives harder and harder. As an adult, there are far more issues they have to deal with than as a child. Making friends, getting a job in a white dominated society are the next steps of their survival. In our world, having friendships and being social can be seen very natural as beings living in a society in which discrimination is not so much apparent as it is in Britain. But for a Pakistani, an Indian an Asian or even for all colored ones living with the ‘others’, having white friends and keeping that friendships for so long is something very hard. Because anybody who is not English is ‘black’ for the whites. And being a ‘black’ means that you are inferior, you are ignorant, you are dirty and ‘‘less than human so worthy of abuse and violence’’ (Kureishi 76). How can you be friends with a black who is not seen as an individual with mind, who is not at the same ‘status’ with you, at all? ‘‘A hierarchy of power relationships is being revealed; the superior white (superior in social and human terms) is surrounded by inferior creatures, the black and the dog; who share more or less the same status’’ (Lee 1). How can you be friends with a white who sees you as uncivilized and brutal not as a pure human being with mind, with a life, a past and a future? ‘‘I’d hardly known anyone for more than eight years, and certainly not their parents. People came and went. These was much false intimacy and force friendship. People didn’t take responsibility for each other’’ (Kureishi 85).

            However; there is a possibility of ‘friendship’ with the whites as we see in the movie ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’. For the possibility of that friendship, the most essential thing as shown in the movie is money. Money means power on something, over somebody. That means, if you have money, if you hold the power, you can have white friends but from working class, lower class at all. Racism again comes forward… Rich colored one starts to behave in a racial way. He tries to be superior to the white by holding money in his hand as power. Actually, for this time he wants to play the role of ‘white master’.

            ‘‘Omar: I want big money. I’m not gonna be beat down by this country. When we                                                 

               were at school, you kicked me all round the place. And what are you doing now?                     

               Washing my floor. That’s how I like it. Now get to work. Get to work I said. Or  

               you’re fired!’’ (My Beautiful Laundrette).

            ‘‘Salim: (To Johnny.) These people. What a waste of life. They’re filthy and ignorant.  

               They’re just nothing. But they abuse people. (To Omar.) Our people. (To Johnny.)

               All over England, Asians, as you call us, are beaten, burnt to death. Always we are  

               intimidated. What these scum need is a taste of their own piss’’ (My Beautiful  

               Laundrette). By looking at these quotations from the movie, we have to take into consideration the friendship between Omar and Johnny. There is no possibility of a pure relationship. They both have an intimacy towards each other. But neither Omar nor Johnny can think of without their racist backgrounds. One always reminds the other who the master is. And the other shows his racist side coming from his origin in every opportunity that he finds.

            ‘‘Johnny: Aren’t you giving ammunition to your enemies doing this kind

              of…unscrewing? To people who say Pakis just comes here to hustle other people’s

              lives and jobs and houses.

           ‘‘Nasser: But we’re professional businessman. Not professional Pakistanis. … (My

              Beautiful Laundrette). Anyway, their friendship turns into a homosexual relationship which also shows the absurdity and impossibility of that pure white-black intimacy.

            Besides the hardship in relationships, there is a far more important issue to talk about; problems in working area. There is always an available job for a white but not for the others. In other terms, if there is a job opportunity, it is to be given to a white initially before the ‘colored’ one. Is not discrimination as apparent as it is in every area of life? ‘‘One example was 25-year-old Sohan Lal, who was forced out of a job at a foundry in Derbyshire when 200 of his white colleagues went on strike in protest at his appointment. The workers complained that an agreement with the management of the foundry, whereby no more Asians would be employed if white labor were available, had been breached when Lal, the sixth Asian was employed. – He said; ‘I am a British citizen and I thought when I came here it would count for something, but apparently, it is not so’ ’’ (Lahiri 208). As another example stands for it; ‘‘One Indian who tried to obtain a job in the car industry was told that employment was only open to union members, but when he attempted to obtain a union card, he was refused’’ (Lahiri 208).

            While giving the reasons of second or third generations of the first immigrants’ having a sense of ‘loss identity’ in the country they believed that they belong to, I put aside the most essential effect of these causes on them. More than discrimination but less than not having an identity; ‘alienation’ which is a kind of social schizophrenia bores to several important issues, I have given as reasons above, still forms the basis of these second or third generation writers’ works. ‘‘…Writers who are giving voice to the experiences of their own generation of people; often born in the United Kingdom but still without a clear sense of home either in Britain or back in the islands’’ (Nasta 50). The sense of alienation caused a kind of loneliness in the lives of them. Like one’s feeling alone in the crowd… That sense of loneliness is much clearer in Samuel Selvon’s novels and in the characters of his ‘Londoners’. At the beginning of The Lonely Londoners, the atmosphere of Selvon’s city is described; ‘‘as if it is not London at all but some strange place on another planet’’ (Selvon 23). And the protagonist of the novel; Moses feels that solitude deeply. ‘‘…when you go down a little you bounce up a misery and pathos and a kind of frightening-what? He don’t have the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart’’ (Selvon 142).

            That sense of something ‘missing’ captured the whole life of these people. And they will always ask themselves the question ‘why’ until the world accepts the term free will. These people whether Pakistani, Indian or Jamaican are to be judged as individuals and that prejudice one’s being whom from one’s belonging where is a corruption- a corruption what Nazi Germany did. But if it continues, we will come to the saying that it is not a nation based on freedom and independence at all.

MUCH MORE THAN DARKNESS

          Traditionally, Britain has been believed to be an island on which a great kingdom of democracy, liberty, freedom, justice and equality was set. And being British used to be something honorable and they have felt the proud of having it in their bloods. Because one’s being British has meant one’s being the leader of civilization in all aspects. Anyway, in the post-war period Britain’s world role diminished and most of its colonies called for their independence. Another England emerged which changed the conventions that define the ‘Englishness’. Dramatically, they were all dead now and the country turned into one less glorified by tradition, less narrow-minded, much freer and modern in outlook, culture and so on. Besides all these, the time also carried the writers of that period to another way; another style. Novels more insisted on liberty and freedom and were more experimental. They chose characters who were stuck between the battlefield and the utopic beyond. And William Golding was one of them. His basic concern was to reflect the post-colonial reality to the British ruling elite while doing that he was as harsh as he could be and greatly attributed savagery to them. Especially, English Chauvinism was the term he most willingly wished to attack in his great novel, Lord of the Flies. But was it all?

          The novel can be handled at many aspects but before going into details, we should take a look at its style and concerns that it consists of. Initially, it is a kind of rewriting of R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island in which Fijian people are showed as demons, as savages and there are also some signs of it in the changing characters of three British boys who represent imperial domination. ‘‘We may say that Coral Island is a clumsy moral tale, in which good is defined as being English and Christian and jolly, and especially an English Christian boy, and in which evil is unchristian, savage, and adult’’(Hynes 16). On the other hand, ‘‘Golding regards Coral Island morality as unrealistic, and therefore not truly moral, and he has used it ironically in his own novel, as a foil for his own version of man’s moral nature’’(Hynes 16). Because he believes that human’s salvation can come true only when he/she recognizes the macrocosm in which he/she is a microcosm.

           For him, the concept of nature is much more important than the characters. And actually, that is why he has chosen the same names for his main characters with Coral Island’s; Ralph and Jack. Both of the novels’ sharing the same setting was much more than a coincidence; an isolated coral island away from the outer world of adults. And they were all done on purpose by Golding to attract the attention of the readers, to make his concern more striking and more discernible. We may say as well that Golding’s Lord of the Flies is a refutation of Ballantyne’s Coral Island. Moreover, the belief that human beings are corrupted by society and institutions is also collapsed by Golding. He has chosen an isolated land away from the norms of a society or any other institution and shows us that evilness is there, in human beings’ nature unlike Ballantyne has done. ‘‘Golding’s novel represents an ironic treatment of R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island, a children’s classic that represents the romantic adventures of a group of English schoolboys marooned on an Eden like South Sea Island. By mustering their wits and their British courage, the boys defeat the evil forces on the island: pirates and native savages’’ (Dickson 13).

          With that dilemma in our minds, Golding makes two of his characters speak by Ballantyne way in the very beginning and at the end of his novel to reflect that irony harshly. ‘‘We have got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We are English; and English are best at everything’’ (Golding 42). ‘‘I should have thought that a pack of British boys- you’re all British aren’t you? – would have been able to put up a better show than that- I mean-’’ (Golding 192). To understand it better, we have to learn the details about the characters and their lives captured on that island until one comes and survives them…

          In the beginning, everything was like a dream for these abandoned children. Away from a world directed by the rules of the adults, they were now all free to do everything they wanted at anytime. ‘‘They accepted the pleasures of morning, the bright sun, the whelming sea and sweet air, as a time when play was good and life so full that hope was not necessary and therefore forgotten’’(Golding 55). ‘‘This is our island. It is a good island. Until the grown-ups come to fetch us we’ll have fun’’ (Golding 34). Although having fun meant like everything, some of them were also aware of the fact that one day someone would come and take them back to their homes. So, the boys first set out to create a rational society like the adults would do. They established somehow a government and put laws that everyone was expected to obey and they were divided into groups for food, shelter and signal fire that would play the role of their location signifier. Last but not least, they also chose one as the leader of them to control everything and to say the last word. ‘‘…he most nearly speaks for us, rational, fallible humankind; Ralph is the man who accepts responsibility that he is not particularly fitted for because he sees that the alternative to responsibility is savagery and moral chaos. He tries to establish and preserve an orderly, rational society; he takes as his totem the conch, making it the symbol of rational, orderly discussion’’ (Hynes 17).

          Ralph was standing for democracy with the help of Piggy who played the role of ‘wise man’ to consult and believing in a social order that would both make them have fun and be rescued. The only thing that he expected from the other children was keeping the fire burning as their survival hope while Jack, as his antagonist, was standing forward with his regime of totalitarianism. ‘‘You voted me for chief. Now you do what I say’’ (Golding 78). ‘‘The fire is the most important thing on the island. How can we ever be rescued except by luck, if we don’t keep a fire going? Is a fire too much for us to make?’’(Golding 77). However, for Jack these were all nothing but words. On that island, he was like living in a brilliant world of hunting, killing and violence. By using the expression of ‘supplying food’ for everyone, he was actually having fun with killing living creatures. And in a short time he gained many followers. They were gathering at one animus of supplying food for survival but actually their real concern was the enthusiasm while doing it. For them it was something new and different from the things they had to do in the adult world. Unfortunately, that was a signal of their downfall… ‘‘But this rational society begins to break down almost at once, under two instinctual pressures-fears and blood lust. The dark unknown that surrounds the children gradually assumes a monstrous identity, and becomes ‘the beast’, to be feared and propitiated; and hunting for food becomes killing’’ (Hynes 16).

          From Freudian perspective, it was all about their instincts. Jack was being dominated by his id with his demand of basic needs like sex, food and even killing for survival while for Piggy it was superego, demanding to control and restrict the society with norms. And ego was the one who suffered between id and superego, Ralph. ‘‘The conflict between Ralph, the level-headed elected leader of the boys’ council, and Jack, the self-appointed head of hunters, corresponds to an ego-id polarity. Ralph realistically confronts the problem of survival and works out a practical plan for rescue. Jack is quick to revert to savagery, dishonesty, violence, Piggy, the fat, bespectacled rationalist, reminds Ralph of his responsibilities, makes judgments about Jack’s guilt, and generally represents the ethical voice on the island’’(Dickson 24). When the time came for ending of the society based on rational thinking and democracy, the children started to turn into little savages with their faces painted like a kind of hiding behind what they were doing. And from now on they were not the children in need of help for going back to their homes but a tribe dominated by id. ‘‘Freudians have found in the novel a conscious dramatization of psychological theory: ‘denied the sustaining and repressing authority of parents, church and state, the children form a new culture the development of which reflects that of genuine primitive society, evolving its gods and demons(its myths), its rituals and taboos(its social norms)’ ’’(Hynes 17).

          That new system or in other words; regime was being ruled by Jack. In Jack’s system there were no rules based on individuals’ rights and freedom. There was only one thing that was counted; Jack’s dictatorship. He could even torture to the other children anytime he wanted without any reason. He was controlling them with his own rules which could change within a minute and in return the children were fed. It was a really primitive and an easy form until it went beyond that. Their killing Simon, who played the role of a saint and an embodiment of moral understanding, was an accident. But Roger’s killing Piggy on purpose was the sign of their totally turning into primitive savages. And they did not feel even any kind of feeling like sorrow or regret which was so human except Ralph. ‘‘I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home. O God, I want to go home’’ (Golding 149). ‘‘The battle motif is developed in both physical confrontations and rhetorical ‘combat’. Initially, the pig hunts are ritualized tests of strength and manhood, but when the hunters eventually seek for human pray(Simon, Piggy and finally Ralph) the conflict is between the savage and the civilized; blind emotion and prudent rationality; inhumanity and humanity; evil and good’’(Dickson 18).

          What Golding emphasizes exactly, lies in the meaning of the beast which scared all the children during the time that they stayed in the island although none of them saw it even for once. The beast symbolizes the source of evil in human nature. It shows the darkness side of man’s heart, it is inside us, a part of us. Actually, through their journeys to seek for the beast, they find their own evil sides. According to Golding, man is a fallen being…gripped by original sin: a creature that produces evil as a bee produces honey. Anyway, in the novel, Simon was the only child who was aware of that and who also talked to it though it was like daydreaming. ‘‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’’(Golding 137). ‘‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m a part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?’’(Golding 137).

          Although Golding thinks that the evil is inside these children from birth, we can not judge their way of behaviors with religious doctrines. We can just think them as children who want to play whose only concern is to have fun. They just look everything by this way. And living on their own for the first time, being responsible for their own lives on an island away from their parents who put the rules all the time is a big deal for them to overcome even if it has caused all these. ‘‘There is no real basis for his surprise, for life on the island has only imitated the larger tragedy in which the adults of the outside world attempted to govern themselves reasonably but ended in the same game of hunt and kill’’ (Baker 23). Anyway, I think there are much more important concerns of Golding in the novel which deserve to be argued in great details. ‘‘It seems clear that Lord of the Flies should be read as a normal novel embodying a conception of human depravity which is compatible with, but not limited, the Christian doctrine of Original Sin’’(Hynes 21).

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        ABOUT AN ESSAY OF DRAMATIC POESY

         John Dryden (1631-1700) was a literary critic, poet, playwright, translator and also a neo-classicist. He was the most important and dominant figure of Restoration Literature. During his lifetime, he wrote many satires and about thirty plays. Though he wrote also some heroic plays, they were not as much respected as they were to be. Since, the Restoration Period was a no-heroic age. While his best play was All for Love, his best work of art was accepted as An Essay of Dramatic Poesy which was first published in 1668. It was thought to be written during the plague year of 1666. Dryden undertook the subject that was put forward by Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie (1580) and tried to justify drama as a legitimate form of art. However, Dryden had a different style of writing. In the need of expressing himself clearly, he used the dialogue technique set among four characters, Crites, Eugenius, Lisideius and Neander to show his preference in the Ancient, Modern, French and English writers. In fact, the characters whom he chose on purpose were not fictional but real ones. These four speakers represented the Earl of Dorset; English poet and courtier, Robert Howard; English playwright and politician, Sir Charles Sedley; English wit, dramatist and politician, and lastly John Dryden, himself. At first, the essay started off like a story which stated a historical fact of the time; the image of four sailing men through the Thames and observing the battle between the British and Dutch navies. Dryden wrote this essay as a dramatic dialogue with four characters representing four critical positions, these four critical positions stand for three important issues, the relative merits of ancient and modern poetry; which one is superior to the other, the relative merits of English and French Drama; which one is inferior to the other and lastly, appropriateness of Rhyme in Drama. Crites comes to the stage with the first discussion and stands for the superiority of the ancients over the moderns. He says that they formed the unities; dramatic rules shaped by Aristotle which the current French playwrights still follow. According to Crites, Ben Jonson as the greatest English playwright followed the ancients’ heritage by referring to the unities. ‘‘… he loved their fashion when he wore their clothes…’’ (112). The speakers actually contrast Ben Jonson who wrote regular plays and also obeyed all the Classical rules, with William Shakespeare who broke these dramatic rules and unities with great abandon. Eugenius, as his counterpart favors the moderns over the ancients, arguing that the moderns exceed the ancients because of having learned and profited from their example. Unlike the ancients, moderns have the chance of benefiting from the works of elder generations. In order to surpass the ancients, something should be added to what was learned from them. Moreover, they also imitate the nature. By this way, moderns are doubly lucky for the sake of art. So, moderns are greater poets and superior to the ancients. Crites interrupts Eugenius saying that they can not come to an agreement. Because, Crites believes that the moderns do not create something new but just changing the appearance. And he concludes the debate saying that the ancients should be accepted as the masters today and in the future as well. Another debate starts between Eugenius and Lisideius on French Drama vs. English Drama then Neander also comes to the stage sharing his ideas as well. Eugenius favors English Drama and accepts it superior to the French Drama. However, Lisideius who glorifies French plays, replies by saying that French Drama is superior to the English and also any other European Drama. He supports himself by accepting the French Drama as the most strictly faithful one to the Aristotle’s three unities. He also argues that French Drama is superior to ancient ones as well. Furthermore, he accepts Shakespeare’s plays as defaults. Since, he conjoins tragedy and comedy. ‘‘There is no theater in the world has anything so absurd as the English tragicomedy…in two hours and a half, we run through all the fits of Bedlam’’(117). Lisideius defines it as ‘‘unnatural mixture of comedy and tragedy’’ (113). Shakespeare’s plays’ consisting of both a plot and a sub plot is also a default according to Lisideius. He goes further by saying that some actions which should be done behind the scene such as a battle or a murder which English Drama lacks and causes turmoil on the scene. He finishes his defense by saying none of the French plays end with any unbelievable conversions. Neander goes on to defend English Drama and tragicomedy. According to him, tragicomedy increases the effectiveness of both tragic and comic elements by way of contrast. He accepts it as a new invention, perfection, a more pleasant way of writing for the stage. He then criticizes French Drama especially for its shallowness: consisting of only one plot without sub plots; showing to the audience too little action but too many words, shortly, its narrowness of imagination. And these are all qualities which makes it inferior to the English Drama. Neander extends his criticism of French Drama by reasoning for his preference of Shakespeare over Ben Jonson. According to him, Shakespeare has ‘‘the largest and most comprehensive soul’’ (125) while Jonson is ‘‘the most learned and judicious writer which any theater ever had’’ (125). Moreover, Neander prefers Shakespeare for his greater faithfulness to the life while Jonson has a French/Classical tendency to deal with the ‘beauties of a statue, but not of man’. ‘‘If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our Dramatick Poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him but I love Shakespeare’’ (126). The last debate takes its start by Crites’ objecting to rhyme in plays. ‘‘Rhyme is incapable of expressing the greatest thought naturally, and the lowest it can not with any grace: for what is more unbefitting the majesty of verse, than to call a servant or bid a door be shut in rhyme?’’(130). According to him, no man speaks in rhyme, and if the stage is reflection of the real life, then why he ought to do it on the stage. He supports his objection by citing from Aristotle as saying ‘‘plays should be writ in that kind of verse which is nearest prose’’ (131). He uses it as a justification for banishing rhyme from drama in favor of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). Although blank verse lines no more spontaneous than rhymed lines are, they are still to be preferred because they are much more nearer to the nature. Neander responds to these objections which are against rhyme by admitting at first that ‘verse so tedious’ is inappropriate to drama and to anything else. On the other hand, ‘Natural rhymed’ verse is appropriate not only to the dramatic but also to the non dramatic poetry. And naturalness of a rhyme shows how well chosen the rhymes are. That is, drama is to be written in rhymes and these rhymed lines should be the ones which are closer to the real life and will make it much more believable for the audience. Lastly, rhymed lines are also necessary to arouse the ‘emotional effect’ which will take the audience to catharsis by the feelings of pity and fear.

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Lost in Translation

          ‘‘Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we’re absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.’’

                                                                                                                                                                               Ivan Turgenev

          Monica Ali is the daughter of Bangladeshi parents who came to England at the age of three. She studied at Oxford University and became known with her first striking novel Brick Lane which was shortlisted for 2003 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and later made into a film and released in 2007. In her novel, she tells the story of a Bangladeshi family who explores the British immigrant experience in a specific area of East London. Though the novel seems breathtaking with its interconnected plot switches from one country to the other, the film version seems most likely lost in translation.

          The novel takes its start with the troubled birth of the central character, Nazneen in what is then known as East Pakistan. Just after a short prologue, the novel takes its shape through the events after Nazneen’s arranged marriage at the age of sixteen to a forty year old man who ‘‘had a face like a frog’’ (Ali 17).She is casted out of the life she is used to and bound to in the countryside of Bangladesh and sent away to England in where her husband, Chanu has a job and life. ‘‘As Nazneen grew she heard many times this story of How You Were Left To Your Fate’’ and also taught that ‘‘fighting against one’s fate can weaken the blood’’ (15). That is why she silently submits to the superior power of fate over her life in a London flat. Luckily, she finds other Bangladeshis living in there that will help her feel little or less like at home. However, Chanu accuses the other immigrants of being uneducated, illiterate and uncultured. So, he does not approve of Nazneen’s close relationship with these people that he thinks ‘below’.

          Although the marriage of them is not a love marriage, at least ‘‘he was kind and gentle’’ (22) towards her until she has heard that he simply accepts her as a ‘‘good worker. Cleaning and cooking and all that’’. ‘‘What had she imagined? That he was in love with her?’’(23). The answer was easy, it was nothing beyond an arranged marriage and it would not be ever. Though even a while she thought as a foolish girl, she then opened her eyes to the harsh reality of her new life. It was totally different from the times she used to be the ‘good’ daughter of her family in which she was too happy with her young sister Hasina.

          However, the life has not given Hasina what she has expected like Nazneen. She has eloped in a ‘love’ marriage but later she has been disowned by her husband. Anyway, Hasina whose fate at home in Dhaka changes throughout the fifteen years has been Nazneen’s only contact with ‘home’ through the letters they write to each other during the novel. With the exchange of these letters, Ali tries to show us simultaneous lives of two sisters, one at home, the other in London, both similarities and contrasts of their fates as the second sex like all the other Bangladeshi women who totally have no power on their written fates in the societies they live in.

          Ali draws Nazneen’s life sensitively by showing her as a regular prayer, regular housewife, regular wife to her husband and a regular friend to Razia. She has kept her silence, obedience and her calmness. After a while, she has realized that she even has a regular motto; ‘‘If you say so husband. She began to answer him like this. She meant to say something else by it: sometimes that she disagreed, sometimes that she didn’t understand or that he was talking rubbish, sometimes that he was mad. But he heard it only as, If you say so’’ (99).  Ali focuses on every single minute details of Nazneen’s life just to make us observe these minute changes simultaneously that takes place in the developing relationship of Nazneen and Chanu as a result of their daily challenges. On the other hand, there stands Hasina’s life which is far more dramatic. Because of the ‘crime’ that their marriage has, she desperately waits for the time that will come and her husband’s mother will lover her like a daughter. The only thing she says in her letters is her husband’s patience and calmness towards her. ‘‘Everything good between us now. I do not let my tongue make trouble for it as my husband say’’ (25). Both women accept the ways their lives shaped in and obviously do question neither the reasons of nor the circumstances surrounding their mother’s suicide when they were children. ‘‘Nazneen listened, breathing quietly and hoping that if they forgot about her they might reveal the source of their woes. It was something to do with being a woman; of that much she was sure. When she was a woman she would find out’’ (103).

          Moreover, Ali shows us all the details of Nazneen’s life to make us visualize better in order to understand her dilemmas, her sorrows and even her happiness. Through these details, we see her untidy little apartment better, hear Chanu’s excuses, complains and boasts better and feel Nazneen’s confusions and anger with her life better while she is acting the role given to her as a submissive and obedient wife by cutting Chanu’s corns and nose hair thinking about some little rebellious acts. She puts hot chilies in his sandwiches, puts unwashed socks to his drawer, cuts him when she tends his corns, even though she is pregnant, she does not eat anything at mealtimes with him, ‘‘but for him she would not. She showed her self-restraint like this. Her self-denial. She wanted to make it visible. It became a habit, then a pleasure (…)’’ (77). These ‘‘domestic guerilla actions’’ (100) of Nazneen have come to an end when her first child is born. Although her whole world suddenly and totally changes with this newcomer, she has had the feeling of loss and meaningless during her pregnancy. ‘‘She looked at her stomach that hid her feet and forced her to lean back to counter its weight. She looked and she saw that she was trapped inside this body, inside this room, inside this flat, inside this concrete slab of entombed humanity’’ (76). However, the coming of baby either makes her feel in a different way or keeps her busy. Unfortunately, the baby becomes ill, taken to the hospital but at last desperately leaves them. Though the death of the little baby is painful for them both emotionally and psychologically, it lets the relationship between Nazneen and Chanu go one step further. Chanu turns into a man who is so thoughtful and caring towards her which makes Nazneen feel herself closer to him with the pain of his son in her heart. ‘‘Abba did not choose so badly. This was not a bad man. There were many bad men in the world, but this was not one of them. She could love him. Perhaps she did already’’ (120). ‘‘Her irritation with her husband, instead of growing as steadily as it had for three years, began to subside. For the first time she felt he was not so different. At his core, he was same as her’’ (121).

          On the other hand, Hasina struggles alone to support herself in Dhaka and Nazneen feels herself so powerless to help her younger sister. ‘‘It was her place to sit and wait. Even if the tornado was heading directly towards her. For her, there was nothing else to be done. Nothing else that God wanted her to do’’ (101-102). The only thing she can do is enduring her life stuck in a culture in which she feels she has no value while Hasina is an object of torture and abuse in Dhaka. ‘‘Hasina was working, but Hasina had no choice. If she had a husband or a father…’’ (125). Even though Hasina has been living in bad circumstances, Nazneen learns it in time by herself through Hasina’s letters that her sister is nothing but a whore who is just living for the survival of her tomorrow. ‘‘How to write? What to tell? Sister I have bring shame on self. I tell you what happen. If you write to me even in spite you know what I have done it not because I trick you to think I am good person’’ (165). However, as their mother says, ‘‘If God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men’’ (80).

          Though he seems basically like a good man, Chanu, in fact, neither considers Hasina nor cares about her troubles of survival. Furthermore, he even forces his daughters who are born after the following years of the death of their son, Raqib to memorize long passages of traditional poetry because of the fact that he is an educated man who studied English literature in contrast to the other immigrants and beats them when they fail. Because Chanu is a man who is tied to the old values of his culture, he is insistent about her daughters’ faithfulness to their original culture in which he feels himself so comfortable. ‘‘I am talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I’m talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one’s identity and heritage. I’m talking about the children who don’t know what their identity is’’ (113). However, what he has been talking about is something so much different from the culture that the daughters experience with their friends at school. So, rebellions are inevitable for the girls and even for Nazneen who in time starts to feel like something inside her is slowly going away. ‘‘Fact: we live in a Western society. Fact: our children will act more and more like Westerners. Fact: that is no bad thing’’ (113). Strikingly, Nazneen finds herself taking her own decisions by achieving a kind of personal happiness, in other words a love affair with Karim who is a young radical. It has been kept as a secret from Nazneen’s husband and daughters. ‘‘It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim has cast a special light on everything, a dawn life after a life lived in twilight. It was as if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted the missing sense’’ (301). Though Nazneen’s adultery seems dishonest towards her, even more or less, kind husband, it is stressed as revenge against the society in which they are stuck. By this way, it should be regarded as a teaching experience.

          Ali creates the life of Nazneen with every single detail to make the reader see the process of her ‘growth’. Without being companied by Chanu, her attending to the meetings of a group of activists who are on the purpose of defending their culture by the attacks of September 11, is an unbelievable decision taken by her, all alone. And her love affair with another man also can be accepted as the turning point of her life which is believed to be controlled by her fate written when she is born. With all these details, the reader also sees her acceptance of a new culture, the rebirth, the transformation and the new Nazneen. That is exactly what Brick Lane shows step by step; the story of an immigrant family in transition with its first and second generations and the story of a woman’s slowly turning into an individual.

          On the other hand, Monica Ali’s prize winning 2003 novel’s film adaptation made by Sarah Gavron and was released in 2007. In contrast to the controversy of the novel, the film is safer and more accessible to a broader audience and it has ‘partially’ succeeded in visualizing a Muslim woman who lacks of courage to stand up for her own ideals, ideas, desires and expectations from her own life. The other characters are also examined with great care and consideration but they are not given so much importance apart from a soft dissatisfaction with their life stuck in one single surrounding during the 9/11 tensions.

          The film starts with the appearance of Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) on the scene who is now 33, a wife and a mother struggling to find her place in the world. Different from the prologue of Ali’s novel, Gavron jumps into the life of Nazneen with her husband and two daughters by disregarding her life before and until the death of her little baby in the film. Just a photo of the baby in frame is shown to make the audience be aware of his existence once. Also, Nazneen’s life before her marriage with her younger sister and her mother’s suicide is shown with flashbacks in snatches. So, through these flashbacks the audience learns that Nazneen is sold off to an old man named Chanu (Satish Kaushik) after her mother’s suicide and sent off to London to be a proper, obedient Muslim wife and caring mother to two daughters, Bibi and Shahana(Lana Rahman, Naeema Begum). 

          Set in a proper part of East London where the streets signs are both in English and Bengali, where the market and curry shops only appeal to South Asian immigrants, Brick Lane portrays the melodramatic life of a lonely woman in that crowd who shares the rest of her life with an older man that usually starts his speeches by quoting from Thackeray and the Brontes. Chanu comes to the stage as an arrogant, dumb man who believes in the possibilities of upward mobility in British system as a result of his high expectations of a promotion. However, he is crossed when a white colleague of him gets the expected promotion. After this fail, Chanu quits his job and starts to look for other alternatives to support his family what actually ends up with nonsensical and unrealistic opportunities like future in soap business. He even goes one step further by borrowing money from the usurer neighbor, Mrs. Islam to buy a computer with the awkward aim of connecting with the world.

          Anyway, Nazneen starts to work at home by sewing both to support the income of the family and to pay the debt of her husband to Mrs. Islam. And actually, that is how Karim (Christopher Simpson) comes into the life of Nazneen and ours by showing up with a pair of jeans for Nazneen to sew that followed by regular visits. Though Nazneen’s new job threatens the patriarchal power of her husband, she never gives up it which is accepted as one of the little but important signs of gaining her individuality apart from her insistence to learn English. However, the real reason slowly starts to take its place in her mind then in her heart. She lets her desperate situation replaced by passion, desire, excitement and the dreams of another sort of existence, not much about the sense of acceptance but more about love. Actually, in the novel the glimpses of an expected love affair is started to be seen slowly within lines. But in the film, the audience sees what is going through their minds with the help of the scene in which Karim puts his hand to the opal glass of the door when he leaves the apartment and Nazneen also places her hand against it, too, their hands are together but not touching. Though we do not so much pity on Chanu in the novel because of that love affair and her wife’s adultery, Gavron makes the audience feel sorry for him as a result of her showing this figure far more sympathetic than he is in the novel. 

          Nazneen’s oldest daughter Shahana is possibly the most convincing character who is both caring and arrogant about her parents’ damaged relationship and lack of communication. And strikingly, she is the only character who makes Nazneen’s pen friendship with Hasina who is an off-screen character seem believably concrete by performing as a mirror figure of her absence. Furthermore, she is also the first one who feels something is going on between her mother and the younger man.

          In contrast to the differences written above, Gavron places the 9/11 subplot into the script agreeably by using this event to confuse Nazneen’s mind much more than before. She desperately feels lost between her lover who has turned into a young activist and her demanding husband while she is stuck within her dreams of childhood with Hasina.

          However, much of the struggle in translating the striking power of the novel upon the screen most likely comes up from the modest characteristic of Nazneen. Because her struggles and dilemmas are mostly internal as a result of her inability of voicing what is in her mind. With the help of some voice-overs and the long-lasting, slow motion scenes of the discontent surrounded household, Gavron lets the audience create some insight but while doing that she lacks of depending her rebellion on a justified and logical reason. But Chatterjee’s performance as Nazneen can also be seen less persuasive than Nazneen in the novel. She   successfully reflects the weakness of Nazneen but her inability of acting out the internal struggle and rebellion of Nazneen makes some of the shortcomings of the script even worse. Anyway, by softening the controversy of the novel, Brick Lane does not succeed so much as a film even lost in translation.

          Although lesbian, gay and queer theories are related subjects with each other, they actually represent separate emphasis on the relationship between gender and sexuality. Lesbian, gay and Queer theories look for the answers to the question of sexuality and sexual difference. By some means or other, they observe the ways that the term ‘gender’ stands in, out and against to any word uttered. That can be any text, even something ‘nonsexual’ like a postcard or a recipe for a meal; anything can be the subject of lesbian, gay and queer observation. However, to understand the theories better, we should dig into the terms separately in great detail.

          Lesbian and gay criticisms have a brief but striking history. In Bonnie Zimmerman’s The Safe Sea of Women (1990), Robert K. Martin’s The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979) and John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980), there is a detailed look back to history both in its true form and in the form of texts that enlightens the ‘homosexuality’ as  a topic or theme in it. Lesbian-gay criticism, in fact, is not a bare exclusive interest to lesbians and gays only. In defining the nature of this field, it is better to make an initial comparison with feminist criticism, either. Lesbian- gay criticism covers sex and sexuality like women studies do with gender. As feminist criticism, it has its own social and political aims within its concerns. Moreover, it forms a strong resistance to homophobia, heterosexuality and their ideological privileges.

          Feminist movements and studies emerged in 1980s as an addition to feminist criticism. Feminism, actually found it hard to cope with difference in terms of racism, sexuality and culture. As a result of this, feminists aimed to universalize the experiences of women either black or white at any class. On the other hand, lesbian critics argued that feminism had presumed an existed essential female identity which all women had in common without taking into consideration the terms; race, class or sexual orientation. And Bonnie Zimmerman, in What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism attacked this essentialism. Because conventional feminism marginalized and ignored ‘lesbianism’. Lesbian feminists think that ‘lesbianism’ should be considered as the most essential form of feminism movement. In other words, woman identifies woman and lesbianism is directly centered into feminism. Zimmerman implies that this definition has the importance of suggesting interconnections among various areas in which women bond together. On contrary, Paulina Palmer, in Contemporary Lesbian Writing states that considering lesbianism by this way does nothing but desexualizes it, turns it into something else; almost a political movement in stead of a sexual gathering. However, lesbianism is not a spectator sport but an awareness movement. In this continuum, lesbians introduced the notion of choice within the terms of sex and gender, so that sexuality could not be seen as something barely natural and unchangeable but rather as a subject to change. After all these controversies, lesbian movement separated from mainstream feminist movement through the end of 1980s.

          In 1990s, a second, this time less essentialist notion of lesbianism emerged. That new movement rejected woman centrism in lesbian feminism and female separatism; instead it formed an identity of political and social interest with gay men. The initial stages of gay theory mostly derived from the social codes of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality in which he envisages the construction of sexuality as a project of social control so as to make people in Western societies construct an identifiable meaning. By this way, gay theory emerged more or less with the notion of ignoring gay men altogether but instead looking to the term ‘homosexual’ as a disembodied social construct. The background of gay theory and social construction has its roots in British sociological writings of the early 1970s. In 1968 Mary McIntosh’s article ‘‘The Homosexual Role’’ both predates and anticipates Foucault’s work arguing that homosexuality is a social role which emerged in England in the seventeenth century. A number of early articles like McIntosh’s were collected in an anthology called; The Making of the Modern Homosexual (1981). The only problem that stands in much of these social constructionist works is again the issue of covering the lesbians. Like Foucault, many of them seem to avoid the improper attention to gender difference by observing the classifications of heterosexuality and homosexuality in cultural arrays. However, in practice, the terms ‘gay’ and homosexuality’-if it is not emphasized as female- generally refer to male homosexuality. And except of a few, most of the constructionist works did nothing to clear this gender confusion off.

          Moreover, the social constructionist movement associates Marxism with gay theory. It points out that strong wave of Marxism supports the gay theory. Guy Hocquenghem, in Homosexual Desire (1968) investigates Freudian analysis with a radical Marxism. His theory is mostly based on the psychological and historical construction of the term ‘homosexual’ as a displacement and reflection of any society’s own homosexual desire. Therefore, sexuality is seen not as an outcome of natural process but result of the economic concerns of a culture.

          Unlike gay- lesbian movements which focus on the issues of identity and desire, Queer theory separates the desire from identity and observes how homo/heteroeroticism functions within the constructions of culture. Simply, it is a field of critical theory emerged in the early 1990s discarding the fields of gay-lesbian and feminist studies. It is a kind of interpretive field devoted to ‘queer’ readings of texts. Mostly influenced by the work of Foucault, Queer theory depends not only on the feminist controversy of gender as a part of the essential self but also the gay-lesbian studies’ observation of the socially constructed idea of sexual acts within identities. While gay-lesbian studies deal with natural and unnatural behavior, Queer theory expands its borders and covers any kind of sexual activity or identity.

          Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) forms the principles of Queer theory. Sedgwick avoids an analysis of homo/heterosexuality in favor of an observation of homosexuality within homosociality.  Homosociality here stands for the various bonds this time between men which are necessary to keep a society on, especially the ones that force to maintain the status and property through women- child birth .This kind of bonds among men through women are mostly directed by Western cultures who find it adverse to have pure homosexual bonds. However, Sedgwick thinks that these adverse behaviors collapse into each other in time either in practice or in literary works. Therefore, Sedgwick’s analysis awakens a kind of awareness that desire and identity are neither attached nor compatible to each other. As it is understood through definitions above, Queer theory is a plural and detailed set of ideas, not a unified area of study. To get the point of it, two examples can be given. The first one is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) which revises the works of some contemporary theorists like Jacques Lacan, Foucault, Wittig and Julia Kristeva in order to point out how gender functions as a strengthening and spoiling matter of fact in their arguments. On the other hand, second example is Jonathan Dollimore’s Sexual Dissidence (1991) which starts as a comparison of the writings of Andre Gide and Oscar Wilde. For Dollimore, Gide depicts a kind of acceptance of identity inverted by sexual difference while Wilde depicts the question of the possibility of identity. And Dollimore takes these two aspects into consideration while she traces back to the Renaissance and contemporary culture as well. What is apparent through all these observations is that gay- lesbian theory exemplifies different identities while Queer deals with the differences to hit the idea of identity itself.

          To sum up, we can lastly define them: gay theory examines sexual difference in terms of male gender; lesbian theory examines sexual difference in terms of female gender and Queer theory endeavors to examine sexual difference separate from gender. Practically, these three terms can be seen as inseparable from each other. They are interdependent subject matters that both simplify and complicate each other.

        The old men’s voices, beneath the columns of false marble

        The modish and darkish walls,

        Discreeter gilding and the panelled wood

        Suggested, for the leasehold is

        Touched with an imprecision. . . about three squares;

        The house too thick, the paintings

        a shade too oiled.

        And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi

        Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion,

        Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things,

        And the old voice lifts itself

                     weaving an endless sentence.

        We also made ghostly visits, and the stair

        That knew us, found us again on the turn of it,

        Knocking at empty rooms, seeking for buried beauty;

        But the sun-tanned, gracious and well-formed fingers

        Lift no latch of bent bronze, no Empire handle

        Twists for the knocker’s fall; no voice to answer.

                                                       From Canto VII by Ezra Pound

           Modernist Poetry is a style of writing which consists of two common features. The first one is a technical innovation which lets the use of free verse in poetry. The second one is an escape from the Romantic style of an unproblematic self and instead a movement through a directly addressed, equally unproblematic ideal reader.  The questioning of self and the innovations in this new type; modernist poetry consists of two terms that are closely interconnected. The displacement of the poet himself is done via the usage of new techniques as collage and visual poetry. These new techniques are mostly applied not for the sake of their own existence in a poem but for possible questions which are waited to be appeared in the mind of the reader without taking into consider the true nature of a poetic work. These changes are apparent not only in poetry but also in music and art, simultaneously.

            If we look back in history, we can see clearly that modernist poetry comes out in the beginning of the twentieth century with the help of the Imagists. Like many other modernist poets, these ones also write in reaction towards Victorian poetry. However, modernist poets see themselves as the investigators who look back the best works of poets in earlier times and other cultures as well. Their outstanding idols are mostly Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, Dante and the medieval Italian poets like Guido Cavalcanti and lastly English metaphysical poets. 

           After this background information given above, it is better to have a detailed look at the characteristic features of the modernist poetry to understand it better. The most common feature of modernism in poetry is its shift of emphasis on self-reference of poetic language to the very modern version of a crisis of language. We can also define it as hunting for an overall coherence of the language. The other one is the rising doubt about the probability of identifying an outstanding single, unified voice of modernist poetry.

           If the turn comes to the great variety of American modernist poets, the Dadaist and surrealist works of Gertrude Stein, the imagist poems of Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle and Amy Lowell, T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land can be given as the leading examples. Moreover, Vachel Lindsay’s fantastic, fully public, democratic poetry, William Carlos Williams’ universalizing regional poetry, Langston Hughes’ black poetry and Harlem Renaissance’s other blues writers are all striking figures of the movement.

          However, among all these figures of the time, there stands one who is called as the major figure of the modernist movement in the first half of the twentieth century; Ezra Weston Loomis Pound. He is mostly known as an American expatriate poet, critic and intellectual. He studied at University of Pennsylvania where he met William Carlos Williams and transferred to Hamilton College. In 1908, he settled in London and had a generous friendship with William Butler Yeats. If we look at his literary background, it is apparent that from 1908 to 1914 his poems reflect the struggles to gain clarity, precision and a direct conversational expression.

           According to him as the major figure of the modernist movement, a modern poet should recapture the vitality of the myths which are ancient, s/he also should pursue a dialogue between past and today by speaking in the shape of different historical personalities. Pound’s obsession with the past ancient works, his dying for awakening the ghosts of the history: ‘‘The Spirit of Romance’’ (1910) foreshadows T.S. Eliot’s argument in ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’ (1919). The language in his first poems is rather antiquated and obscure as Ford M. Ford says all poetry should have the economy and precision of prose.

           Furthermore, Pound’s own contributions to poetry significantly begin with his standing for Imagism which is a movement in poetry that derives its technique from Chinese and Japanese poetry. That new movement stresses the importance of clarity, precision and the economic usage of language. However, his imagism turns into a doctrine which is heavily indebted to the Symbolist- Impressionist way of thinking into an anti-Symbolist and anti-Impressionist area. So, the image can be defined simply as a direct treatment of the object either subjective or objective as Pound says; ‘‘to compose in sequence of the music phrase, not in sequence of a metronome’’. In other words, the image is a fusion of intensity and discipline, an equation for an emotion but not the verbal metaphor of a ‘thing’. Thus, the image can be described as a conceived content which does not provide a territory waiting for being explored. It is ‘a new focus’.

           To highlight the importance of the usage of this ‘new focus’ and to get the crucial point better, Pound’s The Cantos worths being analyzed between lines. For Pound, writing The Cantos is a lifetime project. It is an incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is called as a ‘canto’. And Canto VII is one of the most difficult early cantos through which Pound gets into echoes of the classical and Renaissance world. In this section, he contrasts their forceful vitality within the words ‘‘fin de siècle languor’’ which he takes refuge in eclectic reading and residence in Mussolini’s Italy. Pound goes around empty rooms thinking of Henry James who acts as a Virgilian guide to him. We, here have a description of a man; ‘‘great domed head’’ and quotations from Dante with a reference to his manner of talking; ‘‘weaving an endless sentence’’ which Pound, himself is also doing. Many of Henry James’ characters are attached to the vitality of Italy and here Pound states how the decor of the world is overdone and left behind with its heavy paneling, dark oil paintings and false columns. That section has so touching, excellent words; ‘‘old men’s voices/ a shade too oiled/drinking the tone of things/ found us again’’ and some which are less; ‘‘touched with an imprecision/ buried beauty’’. Overall, there exists a falling tone through repetitions and a tired emptiness in surroundings. The rhythms in that section are similar with those Pound created for his another work but here, they are a little quieter. Many of the irregular lines just seem by this way; in fact they have their own patterns within themselves.

           Our main concern here is the Imagist technique of having image served as content. At this section, we can realize four initial themes: a disembodied reference to ‘‘old men’s voices’’ which refers to memories of Henry James, passages of description associated with ‘‘old men’s voices’’ and a description of Pound’s own visit. Just by combining these simple themes, Pound makes his reflections a part of American refugee life. We are given ‘‘old men’s voices’’ drifting from the heavy setting which is possibly a direct reference to France or England, possibly Flaubert’s Paris and reminds us/Pound James who loves Italy so much and has spent extended times in Venice. James also gives way to his/ ‘‘an old voice weaving an endless sentence’’. We/Pound have also made ghostly visits to empty rooms which remind us James and his love of Italy.

           Pound has the scene ‘speak’ to represent specific images in our minds and hardens a sense of objective reality through these images. Rhythm is ‘composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome’. Because Pounds wants these rhythms to be part of characterization. The technique reminds us what a novelist does. However, the consecutiveness through flashbacks has been disregarded to gather past and present. And drawing characters stand for Pound’s own views. Though it seems as if an unsupported opinion on one side and privacy on the other, Pound is very successful at blocking it.

           To sum up, we can get a conclusion by positive and negative aspects of Imagism. At the positive side; freedom to experiment, ignoring the traditional restrictions of verse, omitting the unnecessary, precise images, extended quotations and rhythmically beautiful passages can be counted. On the other hand, the negative sides are; randomness, the danger in usage of all historical characters as representatives of one’s own ideas (like Pound does) and open-ended nature. Anyway, what should always be kept in mind is that; meaning comes out of the play within images.

          All along, Americans have sought the ways to understand the ‘American Dream’ while as many people went to the ‘mother land’ with the aim of getting their parts from this ‘so-called’ dream. For many, it was the dream of success, fame, wealth through hard work or thrift. For some, it was the dream of a religious paradise and racial equality but besides all these, they came together at one; the ‘dream of almighty dollar’. But the question is how can one achieve that American Dream?

          Before beginning to take into consider the concept of that fabulous dream, we have to take a look at the reasons which made it hard for these people to reach their dreams. We can start with the big gaps in distributed incomes between rich and poor which caused a social disorder in the society and which made the poor poorer while making the rich richer than ever and at last led the poor into a psychological disorder. Not only psychologically but also physically it had a crashing effect on the lives of them. They faced with the lack of food, employment, clothing and shelter. They were in such a situation that they could not even pay for the basic needs and as a result of that, especially men blamed themselves for their own states and of course for the families’. But even if it was not a personal failure, it was an important social issue. And these were all expected aftermath of the ‘America’s Great Depression’ which was not only the worst but also the longest economic collapse in its history. It was affected both their lives and their dreams of a better future…

          However, dreaming of a better future was their only choice to handle with their vacuous present lives like George and Lennie did in the great novel of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. ‘‘Someday- we’re gonna get the jack together and we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs and- We’ll have a big vegetable patch and a rabbit hutch and chickens. And when it rains in the winter, we’ll just say the hell with goin’ to work, and we’ll build a fire in the stove and set around it an’ listen to the rain comin’ down on the roof-’’ (Steinbeck 20-21). While some had dreams, some had no hope for a better future. They were just lost in their presents. Actually, it was a bit different from normal life; it was a survival for tomorrow. They could not achieve to be as optimistic as the others did. They just thought that they were done enough for going on in that world and their times for departure was approaching. The best character who suits in that definition was Gloria in the novel; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. ‘‘Anyway, I’m finished. I think it’s a lousy world and I’m finished. I’d be better off dead and so would everybody else’’ (McCoy 122). Although life seemed like a nightmare to her as if she would never ever wake up, Robert, Gloria’s counterpart despite of all her temptations and her being a cynical pessimist, guarded his hope for the future that he always dreamed of; being a director… ‘‘I wasn’t going anywhere in particular; I was just riding along in my Rolls-Royce, having people point me out as the greatest director in the world, when I heard Gloria hollering’’ (16). ‘‘Sometimes I’m sorry I ever met you. I don’t like to say a thing like that, but it’s the truth. Before I met you I didn’t know what it was to be around gloomy people’’ (82).

          More or less, there was a difference between being alone and being with someone in that survival. People like Gloria were lucky even though she was not aware of the importance of having someone to talk to, having someone to share a future and alike. And also as a result of the situation that the country in, people were forced to be mobile. They were easily changing their places from somewhere to another according to the available job opportunities or anything else like 1930s Dance Marathons where couples competed to see who could last the longest and these went on for weeks if not months and couples spent nearly the entire day on their feet. However, in exchange they were fed and housed and were given a chance to win a big prize.

          By some means or other, these were all for survival, for saving the day. And that was why it was important to be with someone in that survival as well as in that mobility. ‘‘Guys like us that work on ranches are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and below their stake, and the first thing you know they’re poundin’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead’’ (Steinbeck 19-20). George and Lennie were not like Gloria and Robert. They were aware of having each other and they knew the importance of one another. Different from Gloria, George and Lennie also had a dream to go after like Robert but different from him, they were working to achieve their dream of a better future. ‘‘With us it ain’t like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don’t have to sit in no bar room blowin’ in our jack jus’ because we got no place to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us’’ (20). ‘‘But not us! An’ why? Because…because I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why’’ (20).  Furthermore, Gloria was always cynical towards everyone as well as being pessimist. Life meant to be so cruel and futile to her. She was so tired and had no power for any possible change although she also seemed to have a dream of being an actress…Tomorrow was so hard for her to hold on. ‘‘Always tomorrow. The big break is always coming tomorrow’’ (McCoy 120).

          Moreover, people in that time, with the mobility as a result of that depression, seemed to believe that one always had to have as much as he/she could carry. Anyone, anything or any situation that would make it harder might have been abandoned. That was why Gloria insisted on a pregnant dancer in that marathon about getting an abortion. Having a baby would not be something more than making one’s way slower and harder than before. And there was no use of giving birth to one that you would not give a future. ‘‘Always before this time I was able to take care of myself. Suppose I do have a kid? You know that it’ll grow up to be, don’t you. Just like us’’ (122). But was it really easy to take decisions on behalf of someone? For Gloria, the answer might be yes but for George, it was certainly no. Even if he also saw his mentally disabled friend Lennie as a burden who was in need of care all the time  like a baby and sometimes told him that everything could be different if he was not with him, there was something more between them making George endure everything silently. There was affection between them based on ‘love’ in terms of friendship. Maybe for Gloria also, life could become endurable if she had somebody that would make her feel like she was different. And maybe being important for someone and being cared by someone could make her have the guts to handle with life more willingly.

          Anyway, there comes a time when you are to take the decision for the sake of the one you love so much even if it hurts and even if it is the hardest and the rightest decision. But you will think that it will hurt him/her probably less than anyone can do. ‘‘Nobody was ever nicer to a girl than I was to Gloria, but there came the time I shot and killed her’’ (41). And you will also feel that you have done a favor not only for him/her but for everyone. If it was done by somebody else, it would hurt you more. ‘‘I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog’’ (61).Like all the other ones, that is also a part of their lives. One goes and one comes, the vicious circle continues its way in that survival. ‘There can only be one winner, folks, but isn’t that the American way?’.

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         In the beginning; there was a town in which people are living with a total feeling of happiness, innocence, pureness and ignorance. People were tied to each other, closely in an attractive way. Because there was left no place for ‘things’ under the name of ‘evil’ as we know it today. They called this peaceful living area belonging to them only, as ‘Pleasantville’. Actually, this was the name they called it until David and Jennifer came there with a full unguarded package of knowledge and experience. With their coming, everything changed in a way they were not use to…

         If we look through the ‘Pleasantville’ not as a town but in general, as a film, we can easily say that it is a rewriting of the garden story. Actually, it is an up and down version of it. With today’s world perspective, we as ‘experienced’ human beings all know from where this ‘life story’ has taken its start. And of course; as beings from today’s world, also David and Jennifer are aware of that. But there is something they do not know and it is a gift given to them in a miraculous way. Actually, it is a gift presented to all humankind who is not aware of the exact meanings of the words; pureness, goodness, innocence and happiness in ‘real’ terms. By the way; different from a voyage that is planned to be done from now on to future as we all used to see at cinemas or in films on TV, our heroes go to past , the very beginning of everything, from now on this time. The world there they encountered is different in norms, behaviors and characteristics of beings. This town is still an ‘untouched by the original sin’

version of the world. Even if David has not lived in this town before, he is aware of how things do work in here. Because in the time from where he is coming, the only thing he is much interested in is ‘Pleasantville’ as a soap opera. As the repair man Dick Van Dyke says; ‘‘… It was so special. You liked these things as much as I did, remember: warm smells in the family kitchen? A smile from a stranger? You know how rare this is?’’ (PLEASANTVILLE). Even though David is seemed only as familiar with what is happening in this ‘pleasant’ town, actually; this kind of a life is what David really wants and admires. To learn the qualities of this dream town, taking our start from the beginning, but this time in great details, seems as a better way of analyzing.

        In Pleasantville, everything is in a routine daily order organized by the God, himself. People are always happy, and they are away from ‘knowledge’. They do not know what the fire, what the rain even what the sex is. They are like newly born innocent childs. The books they are reading, actually; so called ‘reading’, consist of empty pages. Everybody has a work that he/she is supposed to do. Every morning all family have breakfast together, the mother is supposed to prepare it, then childs go to school and father go to work. In evenings, father comes home everyday with the same cue; ‘‘Honey, I’m home’’ (PLEASANTVILLE). At dinner table, all the family members are ready again. Then childs go out and generally go to a soda-shop in the town or Lover’s Lane to be together with the other teenagers. They talk, eat or drink something, there is nothing sexual both sexes are expecting from each other. Holding one’s hand is even something that can make both happy and satisfied. If we return back to the houses, when it is time for sleep, husband and wife sleep separately at different beds as a sign of they are really not aware of making love. From all these scenes, we can all presume Pleasantville as the ‘Garden of Eden’ before corruption of humankind at where everything has been peaceful and good according to terms of Lord God.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve have lived also without ‘knowledge’ of things. They have lived in the way God ordered without judging him with a pure obedience until they have been touched by the original sin as a result of a being form’s, called devil, temptations; ‘‘For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be gods, knowing good and evil’’ (01:003:005 Genesis). Actually, it has been Eve who first tempted then she has made Adam a sinner, too. It is in the same order with our story in the Pleasantville. But temptation, this time, is reflected as something in a human being’s inner side not as a separate form, I mean in the shape of something like it has been reflected in the garden story. Neither David nor Jennifer tempts these people in real manners. Anyway; David at first, tries to make Pleasantville go through its own order again and also tries to stop Jennifer at her giving knowledge to them. Because when they learn something or when there happens something which makes the order break off, their Pleasantville lives are also changing. But later on, seeing the happiness in these people’s faces after getting knowledge of something, David also begins going through the way his sister has taken its start. Then, David questions the reason why ‘knowledge’ has not been given to these people if it is that kind of a thing which makes them realized, aware and colored like the Satan has questioned before in the garden story;

                        ‘‘ … Knowledge forbidd’n?

                           Suspicious, reasonless. Why should thir Lord

                           Envie them that? Can it be sin to know,

                           Can it be death? And do they only stand

                            By ignorance, is that their happie state,

                            The proof of thir obedience and thir faith?’’(515-520 Paradise Lost).

        Holding a candle through their life paths has been actually what David and Jennifer have done only. Following that light or staying behind have been two choices that they have had to choose between. Or in other words; ‘free will’. It depends on one’s own choices like the Satan under the name of John Milton explains; ‘‘… I don’t make things happen. Doesn’t work like that. Free will… It’s like butterfly’s wings… one touch and it never gets off the ground. I only set the stage. You pull your own strings’’ (DEVIL’S ADVOCATE). The results of free will in Pleasantville have a great effect on God under the name of Dick Van Dyke. He sees the town in change, there are no more uncolored unaware people instead; colored, more happy, and as a result of having knowledge, more self-dependant ones there are who seem powerful. When he sees everything out of his order, he gets really annoyed with David and says; ‘‘You are coming home I’m gonna put this place back the way it was’’ (PLEASANTVILLE). This act of him both shows his fear of losing his control over these beings and his wish of being the most powerful one God, again. I t is similar in some ways with the Lord God in the Adam and Eve’s garden story.

        Their punishments’ degrees are changing as a result of their degree of mercifulness, anyway. The God named as Dick Van Dyke in Pleasantville punishes his people with basic deeds of nature as rain, thunder and fire while Lord God’s punishments are getting harder and harder after humankind’s having been touched by original sin and this quote is from one of his punishments; ‘‘For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thy hearts, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth’’ ( 02:009:014 Exodus).

        As a result; when we look through both ‘Pleasantville’ and ‘Adam and Eve’s Garden Story’ together, last time, we can clearly say that; Pleasantville is a smoother, more merciful, humorous, a little ironic- especially, in the scene when the TV repair points out the big red apple and says; ‘‘You don’t deserve to live in this paradise’’ (PLEASANTVILLE) as a funny reference to the original sin- up and down version of the so called ‘true’ garden story. And lastly, if Adam and Eve had been even less obedient and seemed more self-dependant to Lord God after original sin like David did, maybe today we would have been living in an other Pleasantville instead of living in this Unpleasantville.

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