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fandomhigh2012-03-07 02:35 pm
steel-not-glass.livejournal.com) wrote in fandomhigh2012-03-07 02:35 pm
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Is A Cigar Just A Cigar, Wednesday, Period 3
Cinderella had missed last week to take care of some...business...in Prague and then had stayed in the city for awhile to relax. Truth be told, she was starting to miss the excitement of her real job--though Fandom was often plenty exciting on it's own. But, for now, back to her cover as Cindy Perrault, literature professor.
"I hope you're ready to get back to work after two free weeks," she said as her class filed in. "We're moving on to the symbolism of colors today. Colors are used a lot in literature, though it is one of the more culturally-specific topics we'll be discussion. For example, in the West, white is often considered to mean innocence and purity. Brides wear white to show their chastity and virginity, even now in a time when sex before marriage is a common thing. In the East, however, white is a symbol of mourning and loss, with people wearing white to funerals. Many Eastern brides wear red, as a sign of good luck, while in the West, red was often seen as the color of sexual availability. In the musical Jekyll and Hyde, Lucy, a whore, sings the line 'I've always known / I've always said / That silk and lace / In black and red / Will drive a man / right off his head.' Simply by walking on the stage in a costume with those colors, Lucy made her profession clear to the audience."
Though the short skirts had helped with that identification, too.
"Colors have many different meanings, some even contradictory. Green can mean both healthy growing things and envy, which can be a very unhealthy emotion. Black, when worn to a funeral, is a symbol of respect and mourning. When worn by teenagers, it's usually seen as a sign of disaffection with society at large. Yellow usually means 'caution,' whether it's a yellow traffic light, yellow tape around a structure, or the suggestion of cowardice, when someone is called 'yellow.' Color cliches abound, both in our daily life and in literature; how many times have you read or said phrases like 'white as a ghost' or 'feeling a little blue'?"
"By incorporating color into the descriptions, authors are again taking a short cut. By giving a female character with white or pink roses, the author is playing up her girlish innocence. By giving her red roses, however, the author is suggesting that she's a little older, perhaps ready to dabble in adulthood and sexual maturity. A reference to gray skies or blue lets us know what kind of weather to expect, without any more detail than that. Even in movies, the colors used in the scene can be a signal for what the director is trying to make you feel or think. Sepia tones or black and white for flashbacks to the past, blues for sad or depressing scenes, bright yellows and golds for action sequences. Color can be very important to people; sumptuary laws dictated what colors and fabrics different ranks were allowed to wear, and wearing the wrong color could result in fines, imprisonment, or worse. The use of colors as symbols begins at birth, when baby girls are swaddled in pink blankets and baby boys in blue. That's a relatively new meaning, by the way, gaining cache only in the past two hundred years. Before then, pink was considered a manly color, because it was a hue of red, symbolizing passion and violence. What colors mean, which many people think of as innate, are just as fluid and prone to shifting as any other kind of symbol."
Cindy smiled. "Just something for you to think about."
"I hope you're ready to get back to work after two free weeks," she said as her class filed in. "We're moving on to the symbolism of colors today. Colors are used a lot in literature, though it is one of the more culturally-specific topics we'll be discussion. For example, in the West, white is often considered to mean innocence and purity. Brides wear white to show their chastity and virginity, even now in a time when sex before marriage is a common thing. In the East, however, white is a symbol of mourning and loss, with people wearing white to funerals. Many Eastern brides wear red, as a sign of good luck, while in the West, red was often seen as the color of sexual availability. In the musical Jekyll and Hyde, Lucy, a whore, sings the line 'I've always known / I've always said / That silk and lace / In black and red / Will drive a man / right off his head.' Simply by walking on the stage in a costume with those colors, Lucy made her profession clear to the audience."
Though the short skirts had helped with that identification, too.
"Colors have many different meanings, some even contradictory. Green can mean both healthy growing things and envy, which can be a very unhealthy emotion. Black, when worn to a funeral, is a symbol of respect and mourning. When worn by teenagers, it's usually seen as a sign of disaffection with society at large. Yellow usually means 'caution,' whether it's a yellow traffic light, yellow tape around a structure, or the suggestion of cowardice, when someone is called 'yellow.' Color cliches abound, both in our daily life and in literature; how many times have you read or said phrases like 'white as a ghost' or 'feeling a little blue'?"
"By incorporating color into the descriptions, authors are again taking a short cut. By giving a female character with white or pink roses, the author is playing up her girlish innocence. By giving her red roses, however, the author is suggesting that she's a little older, perhaps ready to dabble in adulthood and sexual maturity. A reference to gray skies or blue lets us know what kind of weather to expect, without any more detail than that. Even in movies, the colors used in the scene can be a signal for what the director is trying to make you feel or think. Sepia tones or black and white for flashbacks to the past, blues for sad or depressing scenes, bright yellows and golds for action sequences. Color can be very important to people; sumptuary laws dictated what colors and fabrics different ranks were allowed to wear, and wearing the wrong color could result in fines, imprisonment, or worse. The use of colors as symbols begins at birth, when baby girls are swaddled in pink blankets and baby boys in blue. That's a relatively new meaning, by the way, gaining cache only in the past two hundred years. Before then, pink was considered a manly color, because it was a hue of red, symbolizing passion and violence. What colors mean, which many people think of as innate, are just as fluid and prone to shifting as any other kind of symbol."
Cindy smiled. "Just something for you to think about."
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