Author: Abigail (Abbie) Sims

Milun and the Influences of Romance

Marie de France’s Milun is a classic example of a typical romance. Romances have been popular throughout hundreds of years because of the way these stories make their readers feel. When reading a romance, there is usually a structural standard of some sort of separation followed by a reunion. 

In the story of Milun, two lovers are secretly seeing each other and become pregnant. At the time, pregnancy before marriage comes with serious punishments, so the couple decides to send their child to the woman’s sister to be cared for. They plan on reuniting once the child is grown up.

While reading this story, I was made more aware of the reasoning behind the consistently flourishing business in romantic books and movies. The plot lines cause a wide range of emotions in the audience members, but they ultimately end in happiness and hope. In Milun, the plot causes the reader to feel a wide range of emotions. There is a certain sadness present in the reader when Milun and his mistress are so in love with each other but can not be together. The reader’s desire for the couple to be together “happily ever after” is ever-present in this story.

However, the sadness transitions to happiness when the entire family is reunited following the death of the woman’s husband. When I was reading, there was also a certain amount of relief when the messenger tells Milun and his son that the husband was already dead. This relief stemmed from the fact that I did not necessarily want the son to kill the husband in order to reunite their family.

My personal feelings became intertwined with the story as I felt pity for these three people that love each other very much but could not be together for so long. Despite feelings of sadness and pity, however, I enjoyed reading this story because of the happy ending. When the family ends up together, the “happily ever after” factor leaves the reader with only the best feelings. People tend to feel happy when seeing problems being resolved and bad situations turning to good, and the romance genre uses human feelings to its advantage.

Gulliver’s Travels – Part Two

Part 2 Chapters 1, 2, 3, & 6 

In this story, Jonathan Swift has a goal set to satirize many things going on around him that he isn’t in favor of. He does this by using Gulliver as his spokesperson, and he sends Gulliver on many adventures in which he uses certain situations to call out certain things that Swift stands against in his daily life. In these four chapters, Gulliver is going on a journey but a storm hits and he and his crew get lost at sea. About a year later, they spot land and paddle to shore when they see that massive giants live on the island. The crew begins paddling back to the boat, but Gulliver is left stranded on the island. He then goes on to meet many giants, and he is paraded around to do shows for giants for a profit. Gulliver is then bought by the Queen, who brings Gulliver to the King.

The King asks many questions about the government of Gulliver’s home country, in hopes to learn something useful in leading his own country. Gulliver goes on to tell the King all about his country and their government with pride and patriotism, to which the King responds with laughter, mocking the way of life there. This is satirizing the priorities of the government, and the King is calling out the corruption of Gulliver’s government and his people. He calls out Gulliver’s people for basically being power-hungry and bloodthirsty. The King decides that Gulliver’s people are absolutely terrible people who are corrupt and evil in their ways, only prioritizing monetary possessions and power.

Gulliver also meets a “little person” that works for the Queen — who is 30 feet tall — and loves to pick on Gulliver. The Queen’s dwarf makes fun of Gulliver because he finally meets someone shorter than him. Because Gulliver is so small, he faces many challenges to survive. Cats, dogs, rats, and babies can kill him with ease, all of which are laughable to the giants because they are such small problems that the giants have no realization of in their daily lives.

Later on in the story, Gulliver sees his Master’s wife breastfeeding her child. Gulliver is disgusted by the sight of her, and he goes on to say that even the women in his country “appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and course and ill colored” (2537). I believe that Gulliver’s sexualization of women and his response to seeing his mistress breastfeeding is meant to satirize how men view women at the time and the fact that men need to change their perspective of women in general.

Swift uses extremely creative circumstances to shed light on topics he is passionate about, and he does a fantastic job of criticizing certain things subtly through his work.