Perfume Week Two Reading Questions PDF

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Perfume Week Two HUM 100 April 6, 2021 Reading Assignment; Perfume up to chapter 23. I’d like to see much more activity in the discussion forums. There is a handful of you who are doing well and doing your part to get discussion moving but there are others whose contributions are minimal or not at all. This week, I want your attention to be focused on your contributions in the discussion forums (this work adds up to a large portion of your final grade so I’m giving you this time to ensure you’re all engaged in this requirement). Choose one of these topics and start a thread in the Perfume: Week Two discussion forum. You are also required to respond to at least 3 of your classmates’ posts. Let me know if you have any questions or if you need further guidance. Get started by Wednesday but continue contributing well into Friday. Discussion Forum Topics: 1. Last week we look at how the wet nurse refuses to keep Grenouille because he has no smell and therefore must be “possessed by the devil” (page 11), so Father Terrier takes him in. He is frustrated by how he must combat “the superstitious notions of the simple folk: witches and fortune-telling cards, the wearing of amulets, the evil eye, exorcisms, hocus-pocus at full moon, and all the other acts they performed” (page 14). Thinking of this passage (and others) in connection to some of the issues I brought up regarding the Enlightenment, in what ways can Perfume be read as a critique of the eighteenth century’s conception of itself as the Age of Reason? Where else in the novel do you find rationality being overcome by baser human instincts? 2. Throughout the novel, Grenouille is likened to a tick. Why? Now that we are further into the book can you see the various ways in which Grenouille behaves like a tick? Why even use this metaphor? What does this say about his character that a more straightforward description would not? 3. What motivates Grenouille to commit his first murder (page 42)? With his discovery of this girl and his subsequent murder of her he discovers something about himself and his destiny. What does he discover? 4. At one point the narrator writes: “Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it” (page 82). In what ways is this true? How do you see this demonstrated in the novel? And how does Grenouille use this power to his advantage?

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5. We’ve already discussed how Perfume is set in eighteenth-century France and how it tells an extravagant story of a man who, as we start to discover, is possessed with a supernatural sense of smell and a very destructive obsession. What do you make of the combination of this historical setting and supernatural elements? Does this combination make it easier or more difficult to identify with? Even though it is set far in the past, does it illuminate any contemporary issues or anxieties.

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