Literature - Maid of Astolate

A friend of mine asked me why I choose the title of my page to be known as 'Maid of Astolate' while I could have used my own name, prompting me to write this article.

Ofcourse, it is easy enough to recognize the name. You only have to look it to guess just how crazy I am about literature.The Maid of Astolate is actually a fictional literary figure, more commonly known as Lady of Shallot. I am sure most of us studied Tennyson's Lady of Shallot when we were in junior high. It is said that Lady of Shallot fell in love with Sir Lancelott when he was travelling to rescue Queen Guinevere. Tennyson just took a part of the story to focus on her. Literature makes imaginary characters come to live like Tennyson did with the Maid of Astolate. She is one character I have never been able to forget.

More often than not, we always come across fictional characters in books that we immediately fall in love with. You only have to look at thousand of girls who can not seem to forget Darcy from Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights's Heathcliff. Or even Edward Cullen for that matter! And we often do transcend those qualities from book into our own life. For instance, girls still look for qualities that Darcy or Heathcliff possess in their real life partner and dream about it, making it so much more difficult for boys to live up to their ideal expectations.

We read because we can relate to it. The more we can relate, the closer the book feels to us. One would never realy want to relate to the villain of any story instead choose to be closer to the kindhearted protagonist but despite that we usually understand where the anti-hero stood from, understanding his reasoning despite our distance from him. But then we also read to escape. Someone once said 'Literature is the perfect antidote to life' and I absolutely agree with it. The thrill is not just about getting home and picking up an old book to read when you are tired. It is more than that. It is not just for the feeling that you might learn/feel/know something from the book that you haven't experienced before. It is for the feeling that the book leaves you with at the end of the story when you finish reading it.Of course now that I write about it, it sounds corny but being corny does not stop people from picking up a book to read.

The thrill of reading old classic books always has a very different appeal. But it is not just classics like Shakespeare that hold the realm these days. We have Eat, love and Pray by Elizabeth Glibert or My Sister's keeper by Jodi Picoult which might as equal any Austen novel. We always get vary of comparing newer literature to older ones. We are not bounded by any rules that one should like the classics better than the modern ones. But more often, even if a person likes a new book better, he/she would never compare it with older classics. This has always been the case.We are always daunted by the thought that old literature are classic which can not be equated but then when we look at it, ages after we are dead and long gone, our children might look at these book the same way we now view Shakespeare and Austen. 


Of course, if years from now, children might start considering the Twilight series as we now study Shakespeare and Marlowe, then I can only shudder at the thought of what Literature quality has come to. But then it always happens, doesn't it? While our seniors studied Shakespeare's 'Tempest' and 'Merchant of Venice', now all the student gets to read is few, if any, works by Shakespeare. We were among the lucky batch to catch the last Shakespeare play 'Taming of the Shrew' in junior high. But then ofcourse, this is an old issue and have been adapted for few years now but it still does not fail to say something about our education system. 


I am a literature student and of course everything I just wrote about is common enough to be my opinion as well as anyone else. But I am not making excuse for writing something down that is so common one can easily take it to be obviously obvious. A lecturer once told me that once you have an opinion, you are suppose to write it down for the mind has this tendency of changing every moment. Once written, you can always come back to look at it and know where you began, so this is me writing it out, whether I change my opinion on Shakespeare and Twilight is as good a guess as anyone else's.