Rasselas 2/5

Musings on Marriage
--pg 94 "Marriage is evidently the dictate of nature...modes of human misery"

• Rasselas: nature designed to create human happiness and marriage is the dictate of nature
• Nakaya: humans created marriage to make themselves unhappy
• is marriage a natural phenomenon or a man made cultural construct?

--pg 97 "I believe it will be found...with their partners"

• married too young: rash decisions/married too old: too set in their ways
• personal opinions?

Examine the relationship Nekaya and Pekuah.
--pg 110 "the princess and her favorite embraced each other...kindness and gratitude."

• their deep friendship may be the closest to happiness any of the characters find themselves

--pg 105 "the princess when she saw nothing more to be tried...speak and refuse to hear?"
--pg 106 "She sat from morning to evening recollecting...opinion of Pekuah"

• value of companionship: close friendship between them regardless of power difference, value of human connection
• power structure in the relationships: Nekaya clearly higher than Pekuah and can command her but choses to gives Pekuah more independence because of their friendship
• compare and contrast their relationship to that of Robinson Crusoe and Friday

The Astronomer
--pg121 "If the task of a King..by any imaginable alteration"

• delusions brought on by solitude: why? Does he imagine a deep connection with planets and seasons because he lacks human contact and this provides him a way to interact with the human world?
• cannot please everyone

--pg 128 "the clouds of solicitude vanished...employment of regulating the seasons"

• innate loneliness of a life of solitude and science, not the happiness Rasselas seeks

Restlessness
--pg 133 "Your curiosity...not now very easily to be found"
--pg 133 "I know not...I would do something"

• Is Rasselas as restless as Crusoe?
• Is it a bad thing?

"The conclusion in which nothing is concluded" (137)
--pg 137 "well supplied with materials...each of them had informed."

• still cannot define happiness or identify it's origins
• yet have they found happiness in their conversation, friendships, and experiences?

--pg 137 "Of these wishes that they had formed...return to Abissinia"

• circular flow of novel
• Are readers left content with the ending?
• What their dreams reveal about their characters--Pekuah: unvariable state, Nakaya: knowledge, Rasselas: kingdom but still restless, Imalc/Astronomer: rest

Just for fun: What are your favorite "life lessons" given by the novel?
--pg 98 "It seems to me...that while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live"
--pg 123 "There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command."
--pg 126 "there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to be hoped from their affections or esteem"
--pg 131 "melancholy shrinks from communication"