Well having never posted a blog before in my life, I am a little nervous about this type of writing style. Being that I am used to formal essays normally for english classes and occassionally journal entries, I am going to approach this as if it were a journal and hope that I can truly express my feelings about the readings through it.
Even though I did not contribute much during class on Friday, I found the two readings to be very intriguing considering we do not truly know what John Smith was like as a person, and that the only thing we have to judge him by now are these types of writings which he created. This fact alone leads me to question many different aspects regarding him and when he first started out in Virginia. For example: "Was John Smith truly as self-centered or as egotistical as he portrayed himself to be in his writings?" or "Did John Smith try to be something that he wasn't in order to get more people to colonize this new-found world?" or lastly "Did John Smith write his works of literature as if he were truly the person of his dreams or the type of person that he had always wanted to become?". These questions seemed to jump out at me after reading his works, especially after trying to compare him to the "John Smith" that the Disney movie Pocahontas portays him as. Who is to say that the real John Smith was not similar in some ways to this character? I am sure that he is romanticized quite a bit in order to grab the publics attention and that Pocahontas was clearly not as mature in real life as in the movie, however he could have just been a man who was struggling to start out a new life in a place that was foreign to him. He could have just been finding his way.
I feel that the type of experience that John Smith had gone through is not really and truly comprehendibe to us unless we all of a sudden were thrown into an uncivilized environment that was unfamiliar to us all. How would we react to this situation? Would we try to harden ourselves a bit in order to toughen up and make it through the cold hard winters and different new situations which they were faced with here? When reading the passages, I could not help to notice the types of words that John Smith used to describe the African Americans. For example, he called them salvages and barbarians. I feel that this could have just been due to the fact that they were different from him and that he knew nothing about them. I paralleled this to our discussion in class about the South. For those who knew very little about the South, their impressions were very different from those who knew a lot about it, or had even lived there. Many stereotypes that we often hear came to light and were proven to be false, but only by those who were familiar with the South themselves. I find this to be similar to John Smith's situation, only no one was familiar with the African Americans or their types of lifestyle and therefore no one was able to prove his stereotypes of them to be false. Overall, I feel that judging John Smith on his two pieces of writing alone is just unfair and not completely reliable.
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6 comments:
Hi Jessica, I just wanted to let you know I viewed your page. Erin
Jessica, nice entry...you really made me think about some things in a different way. If I sailed the high seas to a new land, lived off the land with relatively few others, hunted/fished/grew my own food, protected myself and others from the natives who weren't that crazy about seeing new faces on their land, I would probably feel pretty good about myself, too. John Smith is sort of a (stereo)typical man's man. I've been hunting/fishing before, and I know when I come back successful I want to tell everyone I know about it. Maybe I was a little quick to judge poor old John...
I am glad that you brought up the point about it being a totally differeent enviroment for John Smith. It made me think that all that he wrote about was a reaction to a very new situtation. I think now that our criticism may have been to harsh. I have not faced such a smiliar situation as John Smith so it would be hard for me to judge his actions.
Excellent points, Jessica. You raise some interesting and important questions both about John Smith as a person as well as his writing. I agree with you that the answer of who he was as a person is not as black and white as we may have assumed due to some of his writing. I think it is a very interesting point that it may not be fair of us to judge him on just two pieces of writing. I also think it is quite right that this is how stereotypes begin, and perhaps we should think about that since stereotypes are such a prevalent theme in our discussion and investigation of southern literature.
I enjoyed your entry for the fact that you raised several questions about the reading. This specific question stuck out to me: "Did John Smith try to be something that he wasn't in order to get more people to colonize this new-found world?" This made a lot of sense to me, after reading it, because it could be very true. Although no one knows for sure, John Smith could have come off as a cruel and strict person to make sure everything he wanted to get done, got done. He could have been a good person but when it came to his work and his authority he had over the people, he was very harsh, from my point of view.
I really see where you are coming from and I completely agree with your points and I am glad to see I am not the only person who feels as though these stories might not have been ment as true historical picture but possibliy a way to gain interest into an experience that was obviously the adventure of Smith's life. And if you think about it if he didn't tell this story as he did and left it as a true historical picture we might not be reading about him; his story might not have gained the attention it currently has and then we wouldn't have the wonderful fictional story of Disney's Pocahontas.
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