ENGL 3350

The following questions are designed to provoke a deconstructive analysis of Linda Pastan’s “Ethics” . The Poem can be found below ,but is also available in the textbook. Questions for Linda Pastan’s “Ethics” 1. Consider how these oppositions work within the poem: the adult speaker versus the child in ethics class, the Rembrandt versus the old woman, accepting responsibility versus avoiding it, the students versus the teacher, the Rembrandt’s colors versus autumn’s colors, half-imagining versus vividly imagining, childhood versus old age. How are these oppositions related? (Try making a chart, with one kind of item on one side, the other kind on the other.) 2. In what sense does the poem itself deconstruct these oppositions? How does the ending, in other words, affect the teacher’s ethics question? 3. Does the poem itself undermine or support the assertion that the woman, painting, and season are “beyond saving by children”? What does Pastan mean when she says that the woman, painting, and season“are almost one”? Do you agree? Does that make sense? 4. What do you think of Linda’s “clever” response, in line 14? How is it different from the response she would later make as a “nearly” old woman, viewing a Rembrandt herself? (Is it really different?) 5. Perhaps this poem, despite its title, isn’t really about ethics. What else could it be about? What theme seems to be raised, for instance, by the ending? Is the speaker’s age significant? What difference does it make that the three items are “almost one” but not exactly one? What difference does it make that the items are beyond saving by children? Was the teacher literally asking the children to save one or the other? Ethics (Linda Pastan) In ethics class so many years ago our teacher asked this question every fall: if there were a fire in a museum which would you save, a Rembrandt painting or an old woman who hadn't many years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs caring little for pictures or old age we'd opt one year for life, the next for art and always half-heartedly. Sometimes the woman borrowed my grandmother's face leaving her usual kitchen to wander some drafty, half-imagined museum. One year, feeling clever, I replied why not let the woman decide herself? Linda, the teacher would report, eschews The burden of responsibility. This fall in a real museum I stand before a real Rembrandt, old woman, or nearly so, myself. The colors within this frame are darker than autumn darker even than winter—the browns of earth, though earth’s most radiant elements burn through the canvas. I know now that woman and painting and season are almost one and all beyond saving by children.