Ditz's interpretation

There’s a lot to talk about this week, so I would like to use my 250 words to touch on something that I found particularly interesting.  While I found Ditz’s double personification of a sinking ship literarily skillful, I remained unconvinced of his interpretation of the provided passage.  The first personification, involving the ship described as a woman being violated by a villainous Nature, I found to be a stretch at best.  Perhaps I am unaccustomed to interpreting these sorts of passages, and so the language of the time flew completely over my head.  Nonetheless, I found the second personification, that which described the sinking ship as a woman giving birth to be completely indiscernible from the provided text.  Even for Ditz this scene was “barely discernible” (77).  Furthermore, I felt that the personification of the ship was not the only time Ditz stretched the material in order to remark upon the views on women at the time.  Just as it seemed to me that he read too much into the passage of the sinking ship, I also felt that he read too much into the use of the word harpy.  This is not to say whatsoever that I feel that Ditz should never have approached the material with the intention to look at it through a lens of gender history.   However, I did feel at times that he stretched the material to fit his narrative.  Why look so deeply into the usage of the term ‘harpy?’  It seems that Ditz intended only to portray the usage of what were thought to be female characteristics as a negative remark upon men of the time.  However, it seems to me possible that the act of calling a ship “she” was meant to elicit positive “female” characteristics.  Why not also look more into the practice of calling a ship “she.”  How and why did that trend start?  If the practice were meant to associate the ship with characteristics that were traditionally believed to be more feminine, I would be open to an argument that these characteristics are no more female than they are male, but nonetheless it seemed to me that Ditz focused too much on the negative.  Anyways, I would continue, but I’ve gone over!