The Importance of Reputation

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It is vital to have an admirable reputation so that people will respect you. If you have ever heard someone speak ill of someone, then you would most likely not respect them. If you ever hear something bad circling about you from someone, it will most likely hurt your feelings. 

A bad reputation can make it harder to try to find a decent job, make friends and/or get into a good college. While it may seem bizarre, many life-changing opportunities depend on your reputation, so it is important to maintain a good one. The importance of reputation is a theme that I have recognized in many of the novels and poems that we have read through the course of the year.

One of the clear readings that runs with this theme is that of “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. In the novella, Dr. Henry Jekyll is convinced that all men possess two personalities. So as a result of this, Jekyll creates a drug to separate these personalities, and he tests it on himself. Thus, we get Mr. Hyde, Jekyll’s ferocious alter ego.

Stevenson explores the battle between good and evil within us. He believes that each person has opposite forces within. We all wear faces. How we act outside our home is completely different than how we are when we're alone behind closed doors. This is because we care about how people view us, and this is where the theme comes into play.

As Rose mentioned in her “Case in Point” post, “Dr. Jekyll is absorbed in separating [the] two halves of himself. He is so concerned with becoming a perfect version of himself that he creates Mr. Hyde as a cover for his imperfections.” Jekyll does not want to be known for his bad qualities as a person, so he makes it his mission to try and make a perfect version of himself by creating Hyde as someone to represent all his bad qualities. 

The depth of this system of worth is apparent in the way that Gabriel John Utterson and his distant cousin and friend Mr. Enfield are scornful of gossip. Utterson is a rather unexciting character. However, he plays an important part in the story. He represents the perfect Victorian gentlemen. He preserves order, refuses to gossip and protects his friends’ reputations as if they were his own. This is evident when he suspects Jekyll of criminal activities. Instead of ruining his friendship, he decides to shake off what he thinks and has learned of his good friend. He would rather give into thinking that his friend is still a good man to his core. We can all relate to this in some form or another. Think about this, someone is always talking about you, whether it is pleasing or not, which is a scary thought. 

A bad reputation can keep you from countless opportunities, while a good one can lead you to them. I often find myself thinking about this too much. Every act or thing I say, I have to carefully think about it before doing or saying something, especially when it comes to good friends. Whenever I hear that a friend of mine has done something bad, I refuse to believe it and I talk to them about it— and whenever it is true, I don’t look at it as a big deal, or I try not to. I feel like this is how it is with most people. We will do whatever we can to protect our friends, and help them.

Mr. Enfield is the same as Utterson. However, his role in the novella is not quite as vast. Like his cousin, Enfield is rather reserved individual that avoids gossip. He even takes long walks with Utterson at times and they do not say a word to one another. I find this to be quite interesting to me because I do not speak that much unless I am really comfortable with the person. This makes me a great listener, but a terrible conversationalist. I am constantly thinking about how people view me. So when it comes to walking with someone, sometimes I feel that it is best not to say anything or nothing at all. I would rather have not said anything than to have said something that should not have been said. I feel that is how these two men feel when they walk for long stretches.

“They saw it but for a glimpse, for the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court without a word” (Stevenson 20). In this passage from Chapter 7, Utterson and Mr. Enfield walk by the “mysterious door” and spot Jekyll in one of the windows. Utterson calls out to him and they speak briefly before the joy leaves Jekyll’s face and becomes more terrifying. Utterson and Enfield both walk away and don’t comment on the matter. They would rather refrain from speaking than talk about people— in this case, Jekyll, who is the topic of discussion within the community.

In another reading, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” by William Butler Yeats, the poem obviously deals with one’s view of theirself. We are introduced to a speaker who is looking over his poetic career, when his motivations for writing were clearer. He believes that he is nothing “but a broken man” now. He longs to write like he used to, when he wrote elaborate poems with fun themes, like “circus animals.”

“Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.”

-       Yeats, “The Circus Animal’s Desertion”

However, all these fun thoughts and inspirations for writing have escaped him. The speaker thinks back on the work from his youth, when they were “masterful,” and questions their honesty.  As we mentioned in class when we talked about the poem, the speaker so desperately cares about his work and how people view his work that he becomes obsessed in thinking about his previous work, when everything was more lively and interesting.

In class, we also discussed how dark of a time for literature this was when Yeats wrote this poem. As Daydreamer’s mention in their post, “It seemed as if many authors had lost their trust in the beauty of nature and humanity, and that directly affect their writing styles.”

“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain…”

-       John Keats, “When I Have Fears”

Keats’s poem, “When I Have Fears,” is a very similar piece of work to Yeats’s poem. They are both poems about poets worried about their work. In “When I Have Fears,” the speaker has a great fear of dying before reaching his full creative potential. The speaker does not want to be known for being an average poet. He wants to be known for producing great poems that can be studied, which leads to his constant worry of death. Quentin Tarantino can be placed in the same boat. If anyone is familiar with him as a person, he is obsessed with his filmography and how it needs to be perfect, so that he will always be remembered as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. That is exactly how the speaker is.

The last and final reading is “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde. In this play, the upper class cares about being respectable— so much so that they lie about it. Despite how good of a man Jack may appear to be on the surface, he is a very much so a liar.

Jack thinks that the key to having a good reputation is to be rich and come from a good family. Any deviation from these value rules— being poor or having bad character— may prevent one from continuing down the noble path. So as a result, he invents an alter ego named Ernest, his fictional brother, because his life has been so monotonous. Creating Ernest allows him to go around town while protecting his reputation at his country estate.

“You have no right whatsoever to read what is written inside. It is very ungentlemanly thing to read a private cigarette case” (Wilde 59). Unlike Jack’s good friend Algernon, Jack has a sense of morality. To Jack, it is very “ungentlemanly” to pry into another person’s private life. He thinks that it is good know only what people tell you about themselves. They should never go searching, which is not Algernon’s way of thinking, as evidenced by his later desire to look in Cecily’s diary.

Reputation is quite important in our society, which is why it is the theme of many of the texts that we have read over the course of the year. “Reputation is most usefully viewed as a social construction” (Mahon). It helps people make judgments about others. Each of the characters in these readings play a significant role in determining the eventual results of the stories.

Works Cited

Mahon, J. F. and Mitnick, B. M. (2010), Reputation shifting. J. Publ. Aff., 10: 280–299. doi: 10.1002/pa.362

Photo 1: http://mythicalmonkey.blogspot.com/2011/10/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-1932.html

Photo 2:  http://theresawilliams-author.blogspot.com/2008/12/circus-animals-desertion-ii.html