Stella Dallas Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2750 words

Stella Dallas - Essay Example This urgency is emphasized in educating individuals to speak in one’s own voice, without falling into narcissistic self-containment. It is a form of educating people to turn their voice of the â€Å"I† outward, towards a becoming-community that is hospitable to strangers, and allows space for the inaudible and marginal voice to be acknowledged. This advocacy is a form of educating individuals without narratives of self-serving recognition. In the making of â€Å"the great man,† that is to say, a figure able to sustain independence even when surrounded by many others, is the main thesis of Emerson’s â€Å"Self-Reliance.† While this is a heartening call to trust in ourselves, an immediate, popular reaction can be expected: Is this not too egocentric a notion of the self to be defensible today? In response to prevalent criticisms of the Emersonian self on the grounds of its excessive emphasis on the personal side of individualism, Buell argues that the personal in Emerson is underwritten by impersonality and depersonalization. An implication of Buell’s view is that the underlying drive in Emerson’s account of the self is negative, that is, it is an avoidance of the personal. However, is this the only way of responding to Emerson’s call for people to become self-reliant? In responding to this urgency, the negative approach of reading Emerson does not seem adequate. The task for the philosophy of education is to offer a critical framework for rethinking the structure of language and the self in order to bridge the personal and the public. The purpose of this essay is to explore an alternative possibility for reading this contested passage of Emerson, a reading that takes issue with the limited frames of both the prevailing criticism of the independent figure and the defense. This essay suggests one possibility of such a discourse for education through a reinterpretation of Emerson that centers on the theme of t he education of the self-reliant person, from the inmost to the outmost. A main figure through which we could view what is truly at stake here is Stanley Cavell’s idea of â€Å"Emersonian moral perfectionism.† In his anti-foundationalist approach to perfectionism, Cavell destabilizes the way we conventionally conceive of the self. He envisions a potential path from the private to the public, showing the aesthetic and the existential to be preconditions for our political becoming. In other words, Cavell’s picture of the Emersonian self destabilizes any notion of the â€Å"real me.† Herein, the self is construed not as something negative but rather, as affirmative. Particularly, the genre he identifies as the Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman — exemplified by the film Stella Dallas — is examined as a â€Å"perfectionist narrative,† with â€Å"prophetic language† being highlighted as one of its key features. Given this mode of analysis, it helps destabilize perceptions of the self and of the self’s relation to language, and will show why the apparently paradoxical concept of anti-foundationalist perfectionism is necessary in the passage from the inmost to the outmost. In conclusion, I shall claim that Cavell’s ideas can serve as a critical corrective to the popular discourse in narrative education and political education: its alternative vision of education can awaken the individual to find his or her own voice. Cavell’