To ache is human … Nunez’s Ruby in Paradise

Dear friends and readers,

Just now I’m reading and studying Victor Nunez’s screenplay and film, Ruby in Paradise, a powerful profound truthful (all that) appropriation of Northanger Abbey. After a moment of tension over very different world views,

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Ruby quotes from what was Mike’s Christmas present to her, The Poems of Emily Dickinson:

She dealt her pretty words like Blades –
How glittering they shone –
And every One unbared a Nerve
Or wantoned with a Bone –

She never dreamed – she hurt –
That – is not Steel’s Affair –
A vulgar grimace in the Flesh –
How ill the Creatures bear –

To ache is human – not polite –
The Film upon the eye
Mortality’s old Custom –
Just locking up – to Die

Ruby will not accede to conventional Christian morality as imprisoning and painful no matter if it costs her Mike; he cannot but hold to it. Is this a poem about being one’s self at the cost of being alone. Which is it to lock the self up: when you pretend to what you are not, or when you are true to your beliefs, act them out? Dickinson paid a high price and here she expresses how the hurt feels. How others might see her choice. (see Pilgrim Soul)

How do you read this poem? 

Ellen

Author: ellenandjim

Ellen Moody holds a Ph.D in British Literature and taught in American senior colleges for more than 40 years. Since 2013 she has been teaching older retired people at two Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, one attached to American University (Washington, DC) and other to George Mason University (in Fairfax, Va). She is also a literary scholar with specialties in 18th century literature, translation, early modern and women's studies, film, nineteenth and 20th century literature and of course Trollope. For Trollope she wrote a book on her experiences of reading Trollope on the Internet with others, some more academic style essays, two on film adaptations, the most recent on Trollope's depiction of settler colonialism: "On Inventing a New Country." Here is her website: http://www.jimandellen.org/ellen/ No part of this blog may be reproduced without express permission from the author/blog owner. Linking, on the other hand, is highly encouraged!