Despite the overwhelming tragedies in Edgar Allen Poe’s life, he valued love and the many women he felt it for. With Poe’s sensitive nature, it is no surprise that he considered them angels. Ironically, that great love caused him immense pain. Probably his greatest love lost was his cousin/wife Virginia.

We loved with a love that was more than love.
-Edgar Allan Poe

Knowing that Edgar Allen Poe’s work was inspired by personal experiences, this quote probably reflects the relationship he had with Virginia or another woman he cared for. Here’s the thing, I feel compelled to question whether he truly loved those women; I mean he had so many. Maybe that “love that was more than love” in Poe’s mind, was in actuality mere infatuation or loneliness. Answer.com only drove me to doubt even more after reading an article about widowhood.

Men are affected more by widowhood than women. Widowhood is less likely to be anticipated by men, and men are generally more dependent on their spouse for social and emotional support.
- YVONNE D. WELLS; COLETTE J. BROWNING

Edgar Allen Poe needed emotional support and he received that from his women. I think it’s safe to say that the “love” he felt for them was just dependence. In the case of Virginia, I do believe that it was real love. After all, Poe could do more for Virginia (like teach her Algebra and entertain her with the flute) than she could do for him.

It is Carol Paik’s turn to tell her story. Personally, I struggled to find the message she was trying to promote in her piece. So I decided to answer her question: is she a racist? Maybe she is just distracted, careless, and too old to distinguish one Asian from another as she suggested within her closing lines. It is possible that she just endured so much racial profiling that she has adopted the same outlook.

“I’m Not Who You Think I Am” explores the reality of internalized racism. It is where “we come to mistreat ourselves and other members of our group in the same ways that we have been mistreated as the targets of racism.” Carol mirrors most people who absorb the stereotypes reluctantly and then unconsciously impress the same labels on other people. Because she is typically perceived as her “race and not the individual,” she has done the same to other Asians like herself. I don’t think I can call her racially prejudice, just slightly contradictory.

“It takes a lifetime to build a reputation and only seconds to destroy it.”

Despite the discombobulating of values most adolescents possess in our society today, people in the past seemed to hold reputations in even greater esteem. In The Crucible, even a sensible man like John Proctor prized reputation to the extreme. Within the last act, John Procter signs a document confessing his dealings with the devil to ultimately secure his existence. Following constant pleading and a refusal to keep his confession private, John Proctor tears the document and guarantees his death. Evidently, reputation was worth dying for.

Now high school does not rate reputation on such a significant level, but you’d be surprised. Rumors are still spread and rash judgments are made, but I have never heard of anyone dying to maintain their reputation…yet. I took this quiz supposedly determining my reputation. It came to the conclusion that I was a “serious slacker.” No one has ever told me that, and what does a computer know? How can a computer know a person solely on the way they dress or who they hang out with? Computers are incapable of that, just as humans are.

MARTHA COREY’S VOICE: I am innocent to a witch. I know not what a witch is.
HAWTHORE’S VOICE: How do you know, then, that you are not a witch?
-Arthur Miller

A legal system giving people like Martha Corey the label “guilty,” or at least until proven innocent is nonsensical, considering the quandary of attesting that a women is a witch. With a little research, I found evidence to support the irrationality of the legal system in 1692, during the witch trials. People reasoned that if the accused woman could float in the water, she was a witch; if she did not die from drowning, she’d die by hanging as one. If she sank, the woman was innocent of the accusation; but what good is it if she’s dead? Another test entails burning the woman’s hand in a boiling pot, if it did not heal in four days she was a witch. The woman’s failure to heal supposedly signified the Devil’s hand at work and an absence of God’s presence within her. People were pressed as well. The book goes in depth about pressing in the conversation between Elizabeth and John Proctor about Giles Corey’s death. These tests were not only unfounded, but unfair as well. Guiltless women were subjected to needless pain and devastating deaths. Despite the government’s attempt to compensate for the suffering people endured because of the witch trials, no sum of money or pity could undo the physical and emotional damage caused in Salem.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.
-Thomas Jefferson

Well, obviously that is one think Salem lacked. Oh and don’t forget, that and sensible reasoning.