Blue Curtains: A Defense of Meaning
I hate the Blue Curtain English Teacher meme. If you like that meme, I don’t think you are a bad person, but I do urge you to reconsider. If you haven’t seen it, here's the basic setup:
What your teacher thinks: The blue curtains represent his immense depression and his lack of will to carry on.
What the author meant: The curtains are fucking blue!!
[Cue Squidward face.]
Hahaha, stupid English teachers!!! They think that there are metaphors and themes in literary classics!
This meme manages to both be pretentious and anti-intellectual. It was so clearly created by spiteful students who are upset that their English teacher is making them think about what they are reading. Your English teacher knows more about literary analysis than you. They have studied English for more years than you’ve been alive, and over the course of that study they have learned that authors use symbolism. I promise they do.
Authors write books. They choose every word that will appear in their books. If a word didn’t matter to the author, it wouldn’t be in the book in the first place.
Most rooms have curtains. Most books do not mention the curtains when describing the room they are in. If the author specifically calls attention to the curtains, that means that the curtains matter to the author. They wouldn’t put it in the book if it didn’t matter! And they especially wouldn’t give them a specific color, especially a color that we as a society associate with sadness.
Colors have meaning. If Sadness in the movie Inside Out was red and Anger was blue, we would all be very confused because we have all agreed that blue means sad and red means angry. If the author is writing a book about depression, and they specifically mention Blue Curtains, then IT PROBABLY MATTERS.
Yes, in real life, sometimes things are the way they are just because they are. Sometimes the curtains are blue because the homeowner likes blue or because the house came that way. But books are not real life. An author will not waste time describing things that are random and don’t matter. An author won’t describe what type of wood the floor is unless it matters. They won’t describe the food that’s in the fridge unless it matters. They won’t describe the color of the curtains unless it matters!!!
Do you think that in The Yellow Wallpaper, the wallpaper was yellow just because!! Do you think the green light in The Great Gatsby was green because F. Scott Fitzgerald said “eh, the light can be any color, it’s just a random light. The light is fucking green.” NO!!! It is green for a reason.
And even if the author didn’t intend for the blue curtains to have meaning in their book about depression (come on), please consider Death of the Author. Whatever meaning you find in art matters even if it wasn’t the author's original intent. More importantly, whatever meaning your English teacher finds in art matters. Calling your teacher stupid for finding meaning in something is cruel and mean spirited.
Are English teachers perfect? No they’re people, and they get things wrong. But to assume that they are making up symbolism in books like The Catcher in the Rye or whatever you all are reading is just dumb. Books have symbolism and meaning and Blue Curtains mean something.
