The Minerva Club was a club in which Topaz was the secretary of. It was a club of nine ladies that listened to or discussed poems. In lecture, Dr. Ogden asked us to find out why they were called the “Minerva” Club. This is what I found:Minerva was a Roman goddess of wisdom and crafts. Apparently, Romans would easily confuse her name with the word “mens”, which means “minds”. Minerva was also the virgin goddess of warriors, poetry, medicine, wisdom, commerce, crafts, and was the inventor of music.
These ladies must have thought very highly of themselves when naming the club. Poetry? Sure. But mind and wisdom? Maybe not. In my mind, as a result of the pudding-faced lady, the Minerva Club was not put in such a positive light when I first started reading about the club. Considering the racist views that the pudding-faced lady had on the Joe Fortes and Mrs. Coffin issue, maybe a Minerva Club of wisdom and mind was not a well suited name. However, Topaz changed my mind when she stood up to defend Joe Fortes and Mrs. Coffin. At that moment, Topaz was the mind and the wisdom of the club. As Topaz became furious, she also brought the Minerva warrior to the club as the warrior inside of her arose to defend Joe Fortes.
1 comment:
Sunshine, after reading your blog entry I remember having those same questions in my head during lecture. At first when I read about the Minerva club, I thought it might be a snobby club since it seemed to have exclusive membership. Now that you did some research and found out more about it, the club name has more meaning to me.
In your blog, you made the connection between the club name and what it promotes. I also thought that the pudding-faced lady was discriminating when she made that remark about Joe Fortes and Mrs. Coffin. Surely there is no logic in jumping to conclusions about other people without getting the facts first. Therefore as you mentioned already, this does not demonstrate the wisdom aspect of the club. I agree with you that Topaz was the mind and wisdom because she explained the facts the way they were.
This is kind of random but I wonder if we could have a Minerva club at SFU. That would be interesting…something to think about anyways!
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