Atonement Post

I have not done a very good job of atoning today. Last year I realized that I start sinning so quickly after atoning, it seems a mockery to even try. Instead, today I am grading papers. When it comes to using the English language, Stony Brook students engage in a multitude of sins.
Since we are speaking of sins today, however, I thought I should add a few words on the sin of narcissism, which I discuss in my dissertation. The word narcissism began to refer to a psychological condition around 1898 but Freud was not one who first used the word in this way. Don't worry, we still have Freud to thank for naming a number of other perversions. According to Freud, however, Narcissism is not a perversion but the "libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation." Traditionally, narcissism is a means to trivialize women. John Berger points out that in Renaissance painting “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure” (51).
This idea of narcissism is one of the reasons why I focus on women writers in my project. Much of Joyce's personal history is included in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce is considered a (the?) hero of modernism. Early (male) critics, however, claimed that Rhys was being unimaginative and banal when she used her own life in her novels.