Happiness, P&P, and paper updates

"The inhuman practice of slavery and the terrible disruptions of war were among the most obvious, but they were of a kind with a whole battery of barbaric customs, prejudices, injustices, and false beliefs that Enlightenment thinkers believed had long prevented the majority of human beings from attaining their natural end. Like those twin evils of religious superstition and fanaticism, accumulated customs and prejudices barred human beings from living as they should. Remove them, and happiness would flourish" (McMahon, Happiness, 215).

"This was praise, of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to her ideas. That he was not a good tempered man, had her firmest opinion. Her keenest attention was awakened; she longed to hear more..." (Pride and Prejudice, 262).

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Paper Update

"That configuration of concerns, or master configuration as it deserves to be called, found expression in and through a wide but quite specific range of subjects whose connection with one another is often not apparent at first glance" (Fried, Primacy of Absorption, 7). 

"But La Porte's commentary makes clear that what he himself found most compelling about the Pere de famille was what he saw as its persuasive representation of a particular state or condition, which each figure in the painting appeared to exemplify in his or her own way, i.e., the state or condition of rapt attention, of being completely occupied or engrossed or (as I prefer to say) absorbed in what he or she is doing, hearing, thinking, feeling" (Fried, 10).

I'm planning on expanding on Fried's idea of absorption by further discussing the "connection with one another [that] is often not apparent at first glance," which will be the differing levels of absorption. In order to be "engrossed," one must first begin "swallowing up or engulfing" something. If a person becomes too "engrossed," it leads to the "disappearance or assimilation" as we see in The Female Quixote. I think I want to bring in Greuze's painting Un Pere Famille (or another similar painting that shows absorption) to show that being engrossed doesn't necessarily have to lead to disappearance (shown through the various children).