Farewell

Of Manners and Men

essay

	Szilák Judit English Literature and Culture II. Surányi Ágnes 10 March 2008

 

Our introductory scene is a tea party in Oscar Wilde’s inviting social comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. Victorian London’s finest are having tea in the drawing room, cucumber sandwiches on the porcelain, served by a free-speaking butler. This very first scene tells us all about Victorian society at large, but through the scrutinizing lens of a controversial Irish playwright. Ladies and Gentlemen of the reading audience, let the show begin!

I would like to start with Algernon Moncrieff, the upper-class Londoner, and his butler, Lane, having a brief but telling conversation about marriage. When Algernon states that it is the duty of the lower classes to set an example for the upper-classes in morality, it is poking fun at the Victorian belief that setting moral examples is the privilege of the upper-classes by right, routed in their superior classical and religious education.

The next important phenomenon that the observant audience should note is the curious portrayal of gender identities. While there are just the two gentlemen, Algernon and Jack, on stage, they convey the conventional role of dominating males, who court, propose to and marry their chosen lady. Then Lady Augusta Bracknell, Algernon’s aunt and the mother of Jack’s love interest, enters the scene. Lady Bracknell features a series of uncommon and surprising characteristics, the first of which is having an opinion that carries a sense of command and unquestionability in it. In her overbearing presence the men are cowering in the corner and yielding to her every whim. She decides whom her daughter should marry, not her husband, who never appears throughout the play. Oscar Wilde here overturns traditional gender roles. Another representative of this switch is Cecily, who refuses to play the obedient ward, and decides for herself whom to marry, even providing a “written document”, her diary. In another instance, she thwarts the men’s attempts to make her wait till she is thirty-five to marry Algernon. She is nothing like the romantic heroine the Victorian audience would expect.

Wilde constantly makes fun of the Victorian custom of marriage. For Victorians entering the marriage state was a means of survival and as such primarily concerned with money. As always, our best example is Lady Bracknell. Initially she is cold and unappreciative towards Cecily, but upon learning that the young girl is to inherit a large fortune when she comes of age, her attitude changes to one of motherly love and fierce encouragement.

As I mentioned above, the upper-classes’ right to rule is rooted in their sense of superior education. This is one of the institutions that Wilde brings under closer inspection and then arrives at an unflattering verdict, spoken by- who else? - Lady Bracknell, when she declares she holds ignorance in a high regard, saying:

"Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever".¹

The other formidable institution that is deemed less than desirable by Wilde is the established church. Judgement is passed on The Reverend Canon Chasuble, a country clergyman, who declares that he will be able to adapt his sermon next Sunday to make an allusion to the death of Jack’s “brother”, subtly implying that sermons are meaningless, because the same one could be adapted to any occasion. Also he has no qualms about re-baptising a grown man at his request.

Now that I have discussed how Oscar Wilde criticised the Victorian era in his narrative, I would like to focus on how the same is achieved in form.

The title is in itself a play on words. At the most basic level, the play is about two men who both pretend to be called "Ernest." But earnestness is also associated with high-mindedness, seriousness, and probity. There are several "earnest" subjects touched upon in the play but none of these are treated in depth or tackled with any seriousness. Wilde's ironic approach is evident: he deliberately makes them as superficial and trivial as possible.²

Wilde is not averse to borrowing material from other plays. Earnest takes the most from farce and melodrama. A very basic form of comedy, farce relies on exaggerated characters, complicated empty plots, coincidence. Melodrama similarly relies on flat uncomplicated characters, with a fast-running sensational plot.²

 
“It is style that makes us believe in a thing.”³

Wilde concentrates more on dialogue, language, and effect. The lovers speak in an artificially fluent manner. There are no pauses, no hesitations. Their language is not naturalistic. They delight in a witty repartee and say almost nothing of substance.² With this technique he emphasises the triviality and superficiality of Victorian polite society.

Wilde uses language for parody, puns and paradox.³

There are many texts in this play. Cecily writes love letters in Earnest/Algernon’s name and writes in her diary, trying to provide "evidence" to make her fantasy world real. We later learn that Jack was substituted for a novel, switched by his absent-minded nanny, and left in a luggage compartment. In the final minutes of the act Jack establishes his real name by looking up his father's name in an army list. The diary has a double identity of its own: it is a text within a text, a record of the play's written dialogue.² If we are to think about how texts are used to establish what is true and what is false, it is easy to see how Wilde implies that there may be many different truths.

Finishing my essay I would like to conclude, that in his most popular play, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde the outsider, as an Irishman, individualist, socialist and closeted gay man, was in a particularly good position to paint a realistic if a bit ironic picture of the Victorian society, achieving at once to entertain and hold an unflattering mirror up for those high-held noses to see and preferably learn. And so should we, more than a century later.

Works Cited

For the purpose of writing this essay I had consulted the following critical work: “ Literature Online - The Importance of Being Earnest: Contents, Overview” lion.chadwyck.co.uk

<http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk. >; retrieved on 29 Feb 2008

¹  Wilde, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest, Penguin Popular Classics, Bookmark Ltd. 1994 p. 20. Act I., scene I.

²  “ Literature Online - The Importance of Being Earnest: Contents, Overview” lion.chadwyck.co.uk 29 Feb. 2008

³   Kurdi Mária PhD. English Literature and Culture II. lecture and handout  29 Feb. 2008

Szilák Judit

English Literature and Culture II.- seminar

 Surányi Ágnes

12 May 2008

Angel in the House

Essay

Doris Lessing’s short story “To Room Nineteen”, which deals with a woman’s alienation from her life that leads to her final demise, proved to be a highly influential piece of literature in post-war women’s writings. In my essay I would like to discuss the notion of womanhood, marriage, depression and madness by comparing Susan Rawlings, the protagonist of “To Room Nineteen” with Laura Brown, a character from Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel “The Hours”.

First of all, I would like to give a brief outline of the stories of the two characters, which in turn will give legitimacy to my claim that the two can be compared.

Susan lives a seemingly perfect life in Richmond with her husband and four children, but under the surface she feels adrift and unhappy, so she rents a hotel room to have a little alone time for herself to think. When her life outside her room clashes with the one inside it, she commits suicide.

Laura lives a seemingly perfect life in California with her husband and son, but she feels she is unable to fulfil her role as the homemaker, so she rents a hotel room with the intention to kill herself, only she changes her mind and decides to leave her family instead.

Andrea Wild in her essay The Suicide of the Author and his Reincarnation in the Reader: Intertextuality in The Hours by Michael Cunningham argues that Susan is the perfect embodiment of the Victorian idea of the “Angel in the House”, which envisioned the ideal wife as simple, gentle and kind, accepting her husband as an authority above her. We know that Susan’s and Matthew’s marriage was “grounded in intelligence”, in fact, emotions don’t even seem to register in their relationship. This is most prominent in the mirror scene, in which Susan was brushing her hair while talking with her husband. They weren’t looking directly at each other; they were having a conversation with one another’s reflections, a spot-on example of the miscommunication that had been going on since they got married. Susan increasingly grew distant from her husband to which he responded by starting to have extramarital affairs. Another instance that signalled that there is a wall between them was when Susan lied to Matthew saying that she was having an affair of her own instead of revealing her secret hideout in room nineteen.

According to Glenna Bell, Susan tried to find refuge in her garden, in nature, by sitting there, appreciating the vivacity of the flowing of the river. Her longing for a more colourful life is emphasised by the accentuated use of the colour green in contrast with her big white house looming above her, making her feel like a prisoner in her own home.(Lessing’s To Room Nineteen)

Since she couldn’t find solace in her garden, she went to Fred’s Hotel and rented a room, so she could withdraw into solitude, not having to care about husband or children. She greatly appreciated her “un-being”, the fact that no one knew her or cared about her at the hotel. She let her mind drift, to wander to places she had never dared venture before. Slowly, gradually, she started to put together an identity of her own, devoid of the expectations of society.

 Reading Lessing’s words made Susan’s musings feel like an out-of-body experience, because Susan was looking at herself, at her life, as if she were a stranger. I felt very strongly for the woman whose life she regarded as meaningless and unhappy. I wanted to shake her, to rouse her from her stupor, because her bleak thoughts sent her spiralling down into depression. The  Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines depression as: “a psychoneurotic or psychotic disorder marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty in thinking and concentration, a significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping, feelings of dejection and hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal tendencies”.

When her secret place was found out she decided to end her life rather than go back to the old one, the one before room nineteen, before her self-discovery. By this act Susan denied the stereotypical role assigned for women, that of the dutiful mother and wife. Finding no alternative she chose death.

In contrast, Laura Brown was failing as the “Angel in the House”. She was reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in bed, instead of making breakfast to her husband and son. As a last attempt to be the model wife she tried to make the perfect birthday cake for her husband, like the ones she saw in magazines. The end result failed to live up to her expectations, though, so she decided to go away.

She went to a hotel to continue reading her book. Her room was under number nineteen. While reading, she entertained the thought that she might kill herself, imagining waves of water engulfing her. But she couldn’t go through with it. She found an alternative, something that never crossed Susan’s mind. Laura decided to leave her life, her husband, her son behind. She decided to abandon all those roles that society designed for her in favour of a new life, in which she could be the person she chose to be, so maybe she would have another chance at happiness.

Contrasting the respective choices the women made, I find myself hard pressed to decide which one is worse. From the point of view of the family the women are dead in both cases, because they disappeared from the lives of their families forever. Both leaving and dying was a conscious choice on their parts, maybe with Laura they had the hope that she might return one day, although it would be all the more painful if she didn’t.

Lessing’s and Cunningham’s depictions of the struggle for autonomous feminine identity enables the reader to think of ways to find the balance between the two extremes; and they call the attention to the fact that what was true in 1963 was true in 1998, and is probably just as true today, women will always need to struggle with finding their true inner self and honouring the expectations of society.

Works Cited

Bell, Glenna. „Lessing’s To Room Nineteen.” The Explicator; Spring; 1992; 50, 3; ProQuest Direct Complete; pg.180 (www.lion.chadwyck.com – retrieved on 9 May 2008)

Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.

Lessing, Doris. "To Room Nineteen." Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. M.H. Abrams. 6^th edition. Vol 2. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.

Wild, Andrea. The Suicide of the Author and his Reincarnation in the Reader: Intertextuality in The Hours by Michael Cunningham (http://www.americanstudies.wayne.edu/xchanges/1.2/wild.html - retrieved on 12 May 2008)

Szilák Judit

Contemporary American Literature - seminar

Sári B. László PhD.

8 May 2008

Buffalo Man

The „Disremembered and Unaccounted for” Men in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Essay

 Toni Morrison’s celebrated novel, Beloved, inspired a lot of scholars to try their hands at interpreting this highly imaginative and complex piece of literature. Most of the time they focused on the female characters, the males were more often than not kept on the peripheries. Mother-daughter relationships and “re-memory” are favourite themes. In my essay I would like to take a look at how a male character, Paul D, represents the black experience of that “sixty million and more”.

In order to give voice to black males I would like to reach back to Frederick Douglass’s famous slave narrative of 1845, in which masculine characteristics are pivotal in acquiring freedom. Douglass claims that he managed to become a free man in every sense of the word because he fought for his freedom by literally fighting and conquering his master; and then being able to work and be paid for it. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglas - retrieved on 5 May 2008)

In Beloved the men are unable to fight their masters in quite the same manner. Paul D, Paul A, Paul F, Paul G, Sixo and Halle never even thought of it under the clever guidance of Mr. Garner. Opposed to regular custom, Mr. Garner raised his slaves to be men, not boys as other slave owners did. He listened to them and trusted them to make their own decisions regarding their work. He didn’t beat them or abused them physically. As Baby Suggs recalled, the men were never ordered to lay down with the women to “breed”. Halle was allowed to buy his mother out of slavery and marry Sethe, and keep their children. By the standards of that time Mr. Garner’s treatment of his slaves was much more humane. They were still very much under control, though. Sixo had to sneak out for most of the night if he wanted to see his Thirty-Mile Woman.

When Schoolteacher took over the plantation after Mr. Garner’s death, they were painfully made aware of not only that how much they are not men, but that they are not even considered wholly human either. Schoolteacher justified the system of slavery by saying that blacks needed the guidance of whites, because if left to their own devices they would revert back to their animalistic, barbaric, cannibalistic, African ways. It is Stamp Paid who notes that white people imagined a jungle into every black person. Viewed as animals they behaved accordingly, venting their sexual frustrations on cows. The “sexual crime by Schoolteacher's boys also made a mockery of Sethe's motherhood, by their drinking Sethe's breast milk (as if she were a cow), and taking away from her an important aspect of her existence that made Sethe feel like a person.” (chadwyck knowledge notes) Schoolteacher also taught his pupils how to tell apart Sethe’s human characteristics from her animal ones, listing them in different columns.

The grave effects of the dehumanisation of black people are shown in the way Paul D, the most rounded male character in the novel, looses his sense of self. One day he overhears a conversation in which Schoolteacher gives the value of his “assets” in money. Slaves weren’t considered people, they were bodies used for work, exploited till there was no more that could be taken. Families were torn apart. Children didn’t know their mothers; mothers couldn’t remember their children’s faces. Fathers rarely knew how many children they had or if they had any at all. All Paul D knows is that his body is valuable because he can work hard and do his work well.

 After his failed escape he loses that certainty as well. Schoolteacher forces a “metal bit” into his mouth, as if Paul D were a horse. When Sethe hears about this she comments that anyone she knew who got the bit had wildness in their eyes after it, but there was no wildness in Paul D’s eyes. He told her it’s because it wasn’t the metal bit that bothered him, but Mister, the rooster who was the king of the henhouse, a fighter, although it was Paul D who had to help him to come into the world, because he couldn’t hatch his egg on his own. “Mister, he looked so…free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. […] Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.” (86) Nancy Kang in her essay “To Love and be Loved”  notes, that “Mister's name, like his species, is loaded because it is a title denied to the man who "delivered" him, midwife-like, from the constraining and symbolically potent white shell of his birth. Mister has sexual license and space for its expression, whereas [Paul D doesn’t]. (…) The significance of "cock" is evident even in late twentieth, early twenty-first century urban slang as a synonym for the phallus.”

Sethe called her dog “Here Boy”, which is exactly how a master would call out to his slave, demanding obedience, “to approach, submit, and perform.” Even Sethe calls Paul D a dog, when she realizes that he didn’t take off his shirt during their frenzied lovemaking. (Kang)

One might say that dehumanization covers being emasculated as well, but then I would argue by saying that Paul D’s emasculation continued well after black people had been acknowledged as human beings. Moreover, it reached its boiling point when he arrived and attempted to set up residence at 124, Bluestone Road.

Paul D had his worst experiences in Alfred, Georgia, when he was part of a chain gang.

The one thousand feet of earth - five feet deep, five feet wide - into which wooden boxes had been fitted. A door of bars that you could lift on hinges like a cage opened into three walls and a roof of scrap lumber and red dirt (125)

 He was sent to this horrible place after he tried to kill his master, Brandywine. The white guards, who overlooked the prisoners’ work, reinforced their dominance over their charges by abusing them sexually. Lenore Kitts’s articulation of this in her essay “Toni Morrison and "Sis Joe": The Musical Heritage of Paul D” is I think best expresses what happened:

“Sadistically, three white guards move down the line of forty-six black prisoners each morning, taunting them with a "breakfast" of fellatio”:

"Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hungry, nigger?"

"Yes, sir."

"Here you go."

Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus. Paul D did not know that then. He was looking at his palsied hands, smelling the guard, listening to his soft grunts so like the doves', as he stood before the man kneeling in mist on his right. Convinced he was next, Paul D retched-vomiting up nothing at all.” (127)

It wasn’t only in Alfred, Georgia, where Paul D was placed in the role of victim of sexual abuse. Sethe’s house gradually shuts him out after Beloved’s arrival. Paul D feels he has no say in deciding whether Beloved can stay or not, because he feels the house belongs to Sethe only and he cannot have any claim on it. He is not integrated into the family.

After some time he starts having “house-fits”, but then realises that he is not feeling restless because he doesn’t want to be with Sethe, but because Beloved is manipulating him, "he had come to be a rag doll-picked up and put back down anywhere any time by a girl young enough to be his daughter" (148) When he tries to confront her, she entices him into having sex with her (like the turtles), and in the process Paul D’s tobacco tin, which he believed was rusted shut, keeping his painful memories locked away, is turned into a “Red Heart” again. Beloved forces him to face his memories, and this proves to be his undoing, making him more vulnerable to any more pain that loving someone too much could bring.

The final straw came in the form of a newspaper clipping handed to him by Stamp Paid, whose bravery at secretly shipping runaway slaves to the safe side of the river this time fails him, because he doesn’t dare to be open about his intention: he shows the article to Paul D when there was just the two of them, so that no one would hear; and he doesn’t stop to consider Sethe’s feelings in the matter or that his actions might have grave consequences. And Paul D’s last remnants of his masculinity are lost; he cannot cope with what he learnt about Sethe, even though he knows first hand what being a slave at Sweet Home was like. He leaves 124 that very day, hurtfully reminding Sethe that she is not supposed to be an animal.

How can a man survive such horrors and reclaim his sense of self, his masculinity, which, according to Frederick Douglass, is crucial to acquire a free self. At Sweet Home it was Mr. Garner who gave his slaves their manhood, but it was proven false under Schoolteacher’s regime. Paul D found refuge in nature, he called a tree “Brother” and befriended it, probably because he thought that loving a tree is a small enough love not to cause too great a pain if taken away. How was he able to survive on the plantations and later in Georgia?

Lenore Kitts ventures with the answer that it was music, work songs and love songs, that kept slaves from falling apart, and enabled them to hold onto their humanity that little bit tighter. Paul D cannot articulate his painful memories, as he tells Sethe: "I never have talked about it. Not to a soul. Sang it sometimes, but I never told a soul" (85) American slaves, like their African ancestors, passed down personal and cultural knowledge through music. (Kitts)

 With a sledge hammer in his hands and Hi Man's lead, the men got through. They sang it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the word so their syllables yielded up other meanings. They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods; meal in the pan; fish on the line; cane, rain and rocking chairs. (128)

While repairing the table he broke the day before during the exorcism of the baby ghost, Paul D murmurs a song he used to sing when he was working on the railroad. By shifting from field work on the Kentucky plantation to railroad construction in other states, Paul D shows how slavery accompanied westward expansion.  The song is a railroad holler titled “Sis Joe”, and is an actual song that slave workers sang to subtly rebel against their situation. (Kitts)

Sis Joe (section 2):

Little rice, little bean,

No meat to be seen.

Hard work ain' easy,

Dry bread ain' greasy.

Oh Joe, Joe Lily Butt, ó

Oh Joe, caincha pick it up? (Singing Country 263)15 (Kitts)

Morrison:

Little rice, little bean,

No meat in between.

Hard work ain't easy,

Dry bread ain't greasy. (48)

All the men sang and moved together as they swung their picks or rock-breaking hammers. The rhyme and rhythm of the song helped them keep in synchrony, and it also guided their work by setting the pace and tempo.(Kitts) Above all, work songs gave them some control over their bodies and enabled them to express their feelings of anger, resentment, frustration without risking retribution. “Sis Joe” helped Paul D to retain his humanity.

His struggle to keep his masculinity intact continues during his endless journeys throughout the country.

He who had eaten raw meat barely dead, who under plum trees bursting with blossoms had crunched through a dove's breast before its heart stopped beating. Because he was a man and a man could do what he would: be still for six hours in a dry well while night dropped; fight raccoon with his hands and win; watch another man, whom he loved better than his brothers, roast without a tear just so the roasters would know what a man was like. (148)

After he left Sethe he went to stay at the church, because he needed solitude. Kang suggests that the church with its preacher is a patriarchal place, “Paul fleeing to the church to collect himself is a prefiguration of the exorcism that will eventually drive Beloved away. Such an act foreshadows conjugal relations between Paul and Sethe within the sphere of heteronormativity, and anticipates their reintegration into the community.”

Before coming to 124 Paul D was a drifter who couldn’t remain in one place for long, always needing to be on the move. According to Kang Paul D represents the Western hero in this respect, the self-made man, who does not associate with many women, cannot settle down with one permanently and values freedom above everything else. “The Western hero, a silhouette riding perpetually into the dawn either by himself or with a trusty male companion, personifies self-perfectibility as well as self-absorption. There are issues that he has to deal with, and movement is a metaphor for the wandering restlessness of his mind, and his inability to find peace.” While he is staying with the Cherokee Indians he is unable to decide which way to go, he needs direction, because he is unable to take advantage of his newfound freedom just then.

There is a strong sense of some kind of fate being at play in the novel, because it couldn’t have been pure chance that his feet carried Paul D right to the front door of 124. He wanted very much to make a family with Sethe. That’s why he took them to the carnival (their shadows clasping hands), enabling Sethe and Denver to feel the growing acceptance of the community. He actually went and asked Sethe to have a baby with him, because he resented not being a part of the family. Even when he left her he could only get as far as the cellar of the town church, and no further.

In the end he found his way back to her. He decided that “he wants to put his story next to hers” (322) It might have been her singing that led his way.

The thing in him, the blessedness, that has made him the kind of man who could walk in a house and make the women cry. (321)

Maybe that’s why he was able to tell, to convince Sethe that she was her best thing, making way for a future, instead of being stuck in the past. Their stories joined all the other narratives of the past.

Works Cited

Kang, Nancy. “To Love and be Loved”. Callaloo.  Baltimore:  Summer 2003. Vol. 26 , Iss. 3;   pg. 836

Kitts, Lenore.  “Toni Morrison and "Sis Joe": The Musical Heritage of Paul D”. Modern Fiction Studies.  West Lafayette:  Summer 2006. Vol. 52, Iss. 2;   pg. 495, 30 pgs
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage, 2005

”Frederick Douglass” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 5 May 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglas

Szilák Judit

American Literature and Culture III.

Fodor Mónika

22 December 2008

A Polish Jewish Girl in New York

Anzia Yezierska’s 1925 novel, Bread Givers, deals with a Polish Jewish girl’s struggles of acculturation and assimilation into American society as well as her struggles against her dominating father’s traditional views. The novel has been interpreted as a coming-of-age story, as being part of the women’s liberation movement by feminist criticism or as an important social history. (Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology) This essay is going to examine the relationship between the novel and its cultural, historical background. First I am going to give a brief outline of the immigrant experience in America at the time when the novel takes place. Then the paper will focus on the generational differences that are omnipresent in the novel. Finally, a conclusion is going to be drawn.

Ever since the times of the colonies the United States has been a society of immigrants, as Burchell and Homberger note in their essay “The Immigrant Experience”. In the early twentieth century the US was experiencing a shortage of labour that in turn caused a raise in wages. Accompanied with the power of propaganda, improvements in communications and transportation encouraged Europeans among many others, who had very little opportunities in their home countries either as the result of economic inefficiencies or political or religious oppression, to embark on a long journey to the New World. For these people the idea of ‘America’ stood for a new society in which every man can forge his own destiny and realize his dreams of self-fulfillment.

Jewish, Italian and Slav immigrants mostly settled in eastern urban and industrial areas because it was easier and cheaper to get a job and housing in bigger cities than in the rural areas. In terms of succeeding in assimilating to American society, the ones who came from countries with a culture similar to that of the United States found the transition to be somewhat easier than those of very different socio-cultural backgrounds. The Jews encountered hostility on the parts of the natives, a strange culture and a strange language upon their arrival. As outcasts they formed their own communities, in Bread Givers the Jews of New York lived on Hester Street. They found it difficult to assimilate the value system of the new society. They managed to achieve a so called ‘behavioural assimilation’ in so far as they embraced the republican ideology of the United States, the idea of political equality and the equality of economic opportunity. Reb Smolinsky never missed an opportunity to declare that in America any man can be a businessman and make a fortune, even though he clearly wasn’t equipped with the skills to do so: he made an impulsive bargain purchasing the bankrupt grocery store, without having any knowledge about how to run a business. Still, he was enthusiastic all the same. (Burchell, Homberger)

Jews had their strengths in their belief in the value of education that opened professions for them, which in turn brought wealth and status in society. (Burchell, Homberger)

In terms of ‘structural assimilation’, on the other hand, many of them were reluctant to adopt American attitudes toward marriage and child-rearing, and were discouraged by their American counterparts as well. This is most noticeable in Reb’s belief that daughters had no use for education; they needed only to obey their father and later their husbands, whom would be selected by the father. There was disagreement between generations over what values of the new society could be adopted, what might be destructive for their traditions. Parents often suffered as they saw their children acculturating faster than they did. (Burchell, Homberger)

When the Smolinskys moved to the United States Sara was still very young, therefore she more readily accepted the American way of life than either of her sisters or her parents. What she saw at home was in stark contrast to what she experienced outside her home and she was smart or mature enough to be able to criticise her family’s way of living. She not only nurtured dreams of living another way, she acted on those sensibilities. Cautionary tales have dreadful endings for runaway children, stressing the importance that it’s better for them to return home. Bread Givers rewarded the runaway child for her courage and smarts in surviving. Sara understood that education was her ticket out of poverty and she was willing to make all sorts of sacrifices to achieve her goals. At times she was wrecked with guilt for disobeying her family, for being disloyal to Jewish traditions and punishment did come, for she felt very alone for years. Especially when her mother payed her a visit at her own considerable expense and Sara couldn’t return the visit because she was too busy working in the sweatshop by day making a living, and studying for college by night. But these experiences were just mere obstacles to be overcome. She got her ultimate reward in becoming a teacher and she got her mother’s approval and pride in the end.

Yezierska’s stance on how men fit in with the rest of American society is firm. Bread Givers portrays a line of male characters whose Old World patriarchism renders them incapable of dealing with the hardships of the New World and makes them very unsympathetic in the eyes of the reader. Reb Smolinsky spends his life studying the Talmud and ordering his wife and daughters around without ever doing an honest day’s work himself. Whenever his daughters fell in love and brought home their respective suitors he scared them off. Instead, he played matchmaker and made them marry the men he selected, blaming his daughters when the marriages turned out to be disastrous. The husbands all share in with Reb’s traditional view of the place of women in the order of things without themselves shouldering some of the burdens their wives keep struggling with day after day.

It would be unfair to bemoan the evil of men without examining the attitudes of the women, because, as always, it’s a two edged sword we’re dealing with. The mother, Shenah, suffered because of her husband. She was worrying every day about how to feed her family, how to pay the rent. Husband and wife argued over these things all the time, but it was enough for Reb to start talking about the wisdom of the Torah and Shenah would be swooning with adoration for him. Ultimately, she agreed with Reb’s views, she grew up with them back home. She wouldn’t struggle against tradition for herself but she was immensely proud of Sara for doing it in her stead.

Reb called his eldest daughter, Bessie,  “the burden-bearer”, because she always thought of others before herself, rushing home after work to help her mother with the chores and giving all her hard-earned money to her father. The one time she had the chance to entice a man she liked her father ruined it for her. After that she didn’t care about men, marriage or if she would ever be happy. Reb pushed her to marry the old fish-peddler Zalmon, but what really made her accept the proposal was Zalmon’s young son, who was clearly neglected and badly in need of a mother. Again, Bessie thought of the happiness of others before her own. She continued to live a hard, poor life, with only the little boy bringing her some happiness.

Mashah, “the empty-head”, was the beautiful one among the sisters. She was incredibly self-centered, only caring about her looks, never about what goes on around her in the family. She spent all the money she earned on herself, not giving a dime to her family. When she fell in love was the first time when she was thinking of someone other than herself. Reb didn’t allow her to find happiness at the side of the man she chose; he made her marry a man who seemed to be very successful but turned out to be a liar. After her children were born Mashah became like her mother. She lost her beauty just like her mother, worrying about feeding her children and paying the rent while her husband cared only about himself, spending the family’s money on fancy clothes.

Fania fell in love with a gentle poet but ended up marrying a rich man instead. Even though she was richer than anyone in her family, her husband wasn’t generous with allowing her to spend their money so she was forced to manipulate him all the time if she wanted to buy something without an argument.

Having learnt from her sisters’ misfortunes Sara was determined to avoid their fate. After she realised that if she stayed under the roof of her father’s house she wouldn’t be able to escape ending up like her sisters she chose to run away from home. She found work as an ironing lady and found a small, dingy room she could call her own. She went to night school and managed to earn a place at a good college. There, she got to know how carefree young Americans acted and went about in the world. She learnt not only academics but social behaviour as well. She also learnt that if she wanted to have a happy marriage she needed to find a man that was her equal. After she started work at a school she found that special man in the principal of the school who was also a Polish Jew.

In the end she couldn’t escape her heritage, though, not entirely. She agreed to take care of her old and lonely father after all. The difference was that she was doing it on her own terms, by her own choice. Not only because it was the right thing to do, but because it was what she wanted to do. In this respect Sara can be viewed as the poster-child of the new, Americanized Jew. She kept the old traditions of her people but altered them to fit the new society she lived in. In this sense acculturation means appreciating the old and embracing the new, not choosing one over the other. That is how a Jewish immigrant could create a new identity that is a curious blend of the two cultures she unites in herself.

Works Cited

Burchell, R.A. and Eric Homberger. “The Immigrant Experience” in Introduction to American Studies

Edt. Chametzky, Jules and John Felstiner and Hilene Flanzbaum andKatherine Hellerstein. Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition. 2000.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. Persea Books. 1999.

Szilák Judit

American Popular Culture

Gyuris Norbert, Ph.D.

A Fashion Statement

 There seems to be a difference in how and for what reasons people dress the way they do. One is when they want to express an inner drive, be it their political or religious views or a preference for certain bands. You can always recognize a nostalgic hippie or punk. Or take for example a recent development, that goths are out and emos are in, who are a bunch of youngsters whose collective name comes from their emotional state of mind, which requires them to be perpetually depressed and suicidal on the inside, and made up like a drag queen on the outside. In terms of religion, a Muslim or a Hare Krishna is equally as easy to spot. This phenomenon is supported by the Christianized thoughts of Aristotle, who believed that a person’s inner self is always visible in his appearance. (Finkelstein, “Chic Theory”, par. 7)

The other school of thought is based on more or less every other theorist’s ideas that had something to say about popular culture, about the role fashion plays in people’s lives. This essay aims to take this other view as the basis for analyzing the way in which fashion is viewed and consumed today, starting with applying Thorstein Veblen’s ideas to modern day consumption of fashion. Then we are going to take a closer look at the two newest of phenomena, i.e., the commercial success of the Olsen twins and the American teen soap-opera “Gossip Girl”. Finally, we are going to see how the different ethnic groups view the fashion industries’ and the media’s treatment of their non-commercial looks.

In his much referenced essay “Conspicuous Consumption”, Thorstein Veblen talks about how the fashion sense of the upper classes gets adopted by the lower classes. He reasons that the type of clothes people wear defines their social status and the kind of lifestyle that comes with it. Everyone wants to have what the well-to-do people have, so they do their best to dress the same way the upper-classes do in hope of attracting the same fate as that of a socialite, even though they obviously cannot afford it. Still, acquiring the same sense of fashion as those I want to emulate makes me feel like I am part of their world, and it is exactly this wish-fulfillment aspect of fashion that makes it so appealing to the masses.

Fashion makes it seem so easy to join the glamorous world of the wealthy and famous, provided you have the appropriate attire. As Katya Mandoki puts it in her essay “Point and Line Over the Body” fashion magazines are not just sources of information on what to wear in a particular season, rather they are “personal invitations to visit and dwell in social and individual imaginaries.” (par. 3) In these magazines fashion is represented by labels like Armani, Gucci or Chanel, that evoke a certain imagery in the reader making her equate the designer labels with certain feelings, attitudes, lifestyle, success or youth that she might want to identify with.

The fashion houses of the industry realized early on that more than the clothes, it is the model wearing them that invites women to identify with, and prompts them to buy the clothes. Since then, from season to season, a model gets to be the face of a brand, making women all over the world want to be like her, with the promise that if they buy the clothes they can be.

Ever since teenagers and preteens became a recognized buying power they have been targeted by companies through every media available. Take, for instance, the Olsen twins. After the successful sit-com “Full House” ended Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen used their popularity as investments. Their entertainment company, Dualstar, produced numerous direct-to-video movies, CDs, books, dolls, beauty products, even furniture. Teens from everywhere wanted to dress like them so the twins signed a contract with Wal-Mart for a fashion line called mary-kateandashely. By the time they were eighteen the twins became co-CEOs of their billion dollar company, making them the youngest on Forbes’s list of most influential women in the entertainment industry. (Larocca, “Attack of the…”, par. 2) Their success lay in their image of being “normal”, accessible girls, who just want to have fun the same way as every other kid their age do. The fantasy they created could be realized by anyone, and this is what made them so popular.

As they grew older they became more and more involved with high fashion. Their sense of style changed from the image of the cheerful teenager to a more adult and more expensive look. Mary-Kate became known for her style that tabloids tagged “boho-chic” and young women started imitating her at once. In accordance with their new image they wanted to create a fashion line for young women with money to spend, so they launched The Row. The twins design the clothes with the help of a professional designer, and their name doesn’t appear anywhere on the finished products, neither do they pose in them. They want the characteristic style of their clothes, not their name, to attract customers. (Larocca, par. 3)

Another, very twenty-first century, example is the commercial success of the series titled “Gossip Girl”. The very title promises first-hand knowledge to the viewer of a private world we were not invited to. It is the glamorous world of the teenaged sons and daughters of Manhattan’s elite, who go to expensive private schools, dress in designer clothes and text one another about gossips regarding their own WASP-ish selves.

The way in which people watch the show is groundbreaking for television. Along with watching the show on TV, many of the viewers download it from iTunes or from the show’s website. Fans not only watch the show, they post sightings of the actors on gossip blogs and exchange rumors on fan sites. Distributors clearly tapped in to the way youngsters today consume popular culture. (Pressler and Rovzar, “The Genius of Gossip Girl”, par. 28-9)

The show is also famous for its sense of fashion. The three leading women all have their singular looks from prim and proper Blair through laid back Serena to Jenny’s punk-chic attire. Fans do not even have to make an effort to find out what their favourites are wearing because it all gets posted on the show’ website for easy reference. That is why up and coming designers and the big fashion houses both fight to get their pieces onscreen, it is product placement at its most effective. (Pressler and Rovzar, “The Genius of Gossip Girl”, par. 28)

While watching the show it is striking that all the leading ladies are white, those who belong to some other ethnic group are cast as the lackies of the stars of the show. They imitate the style and behaviour of their white leader, and they do not have a storyline of their own. They are filler. This seems to be the trend in the fashion industry also. There are very few models that belong to an ethnic group other than white and still made it big, a fact which affects the way in which ordinary people view themselves.

To try to balance out the unequal representation of ethnic groups in the media a counter-culture emerged. The founders of the iLL-Literacy site participate in the production of culture through poetry, theater, music, open events and of course, blogging. They promote a view that celebrates cultural and ethnic differences instead of one that tries to imitate the dominant white image.

Founding member Adriel Luis’s poem “Slip of the Tongue” best captures this view. In the poem an Asian guy is trying desperately to impress an Asian girl so he asks her what her ethnic makeup is. The girl flips out at him saying that

makeup's just an anglicized, colonized, commodified utility
that my sisters have been programmed to consume,
forcing them to cover up their natural state. (Lines 32-4)

She then goes on about how she refuses to wear makeup or alter her “natural state” in any way, because she is proud of her ancestry that is visible in the way she looks.

Because your ethnicity isn't something you can just make up.
And as for that crap my sisters paint on their faces, that's not makeup, it's make-believe. (Lines 80-1)

Fashion shapes our view of beauty; it influences how we think of ourselves and also how we think of others and herein lays its danger. In our politically correct society it is important that the fashion industry takes note of how different groups feel about themselves and incorporate their views when designing the next fall or spring line.

Works Cited

Finkelstein, Joanne “Chic Theory.” Australian Humanities Review.      http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-March-1997/finkelstein.html

Larocca, Amy. “Attack of the Fashion Gremlins”.  http://nymag.com/fashion/07/fall/36078/index1.html (1 May 2009)

Luis, Adriel. “Slip of the Tongue”.

         http://reinaelena.blogspot.com/2007/10/slip-of-tongue.html (9 May 2009)

Mandoki, Katya.  “Point and line over the body: Social imaginaries underlying the logic of fashion.” Journal of Popular Culture; Bowling Green: 2003; 36, 3; p.600-621.

Pressler, Jessica and Chris Rovzar. “The Genius of Gossip Girl” http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/46225/ (21 April 2008) (30 April 2009)

Veblen, Thorstein. “Conspicuous Consumption.” In Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: Macmillan, 1902, p. 68-101

Szilák Judit

USA History II.

Fodor Mónika Ph.D.

19 May 2009

The Black Experience

Introduction

In 2005 Kiri Davis completed her first 7.8 minutes youth documentary titled „A Girl Like Me”. The short film featured interviews with black American girls that reflected their experiences regarding their self-image. Also, she re-conducted the “doll-test”, originally conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark, which was used in the Brown vs. Board of Education case supporting the fact that segregation was harmful to black children’s self-esteem, to see if anything changed in the way in which society affects black children.

This essay is going to examine the various ways in which African-Americans view themselves in a dominant white society and how this view originates in African-American history from the times of slavery to after the Civil Rights Movement.

A Girl Like Me

The first part of the film featured African-American girls explaining how they felt about themselves and how they thought society viewed them.

“Every black female has a big butt and big boobs.” says Stephanie (17)

“Loud, obnoxious, ghetto.”  (Glenda 18)

“Light skinned being more attractive than dark skinned.” (Jennifer 18)

“That we’re not smart. We’re this way, we’re that way. And a lot of times we have to prove ourselves it not being true.” (Wahida 16)

They all said that black women were considered to be more appealing if they had relaxed or straightened hair and lighter skin tone. When Stephanie started to wear her hair natural her mother told her she should stop, because she was starting to look African. Her aunt started to apply bleaching cream to her skin in her twenties to make it lighter, and she has been using bleach on her daughters’ skin since they were eleven and six years old. Jennifer used to think she was ugly because her skin tone was the darkest in her family.

The girls all seemed to agree that the dominant white society’s standards for beauty were being imposed upon them, and this standard originates from their race’s history. Because slaves were ripped from their culture and couldn’t use their language, they lost their cultural heritage. Therefore they had to accept what the white people told them they should be like, instead of relying on their own judgment.

I think for a black girl in general it’s like you’re missing a piece of you, you know? And, for me, it’s like oh I don’t have any, any actual heritage, not heritage but culture. Like I know I’m from Africa, but different, the different countries in Africa have their different cultures, their different morals, their different values. And not knowing that, it just, it sort of keeps us at a loss and we’re just… I feel like we’re busy searching for it while everybody else in society is throwing their ideas and what they believe we should be at us. Jennifer (18)

Slavery

Those slaves who survived the Middle Passage were put to work either as field hands raising tobacco and corn in Virginia or Maryland; raising rice and indigo in South Carolina or Georgia while still being able to tend to their own gardens; or were occupied as household servants for the urban elite in the North. Owners controlled their slaves by alternating harsh punishments such as whipping, with promises of rewards if slaves worked hard. (Mintz, “Slavery in Colonial North America”, Hypertext History, par 3-5)

The mortality rate among slaves was extremely high compared to whites. Slaves had a life expectancy of 21 years, while whites had 43 years. Also half of the babies died within the first year of their lives due to malnutrition. The mothers were also undernourished and had to work the fields until they gave birth, then take up work shortly afterwards. Slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths. (Mintz, “Life Under Slavery”, Hypertext History, par 1-3)

Slave marriages and family ties were not recognized, owners had the right to sell their slaves if they so wished, thus breaking up the families. According to some estimates one father in three had a different owner than his wife, and could only visit his family if his owner allowed him to, which led to many mother-headed households. Regardless of the odds, slaves managed to forge strong family relationships. To create a sense of family identity children were often named after their parents, grandparents or other relatives. Because family members were sold all over the country, whenever a child was sold to a neighbouring plantation there was almost always a relative that took care of him. (Mintz, “Slave Family Life”, Hypertext History, par 1, 3-5)

In order to justify the institution of slavery, whites portrayed blacks as „happy darkies”, Mammy, Coon, Tom, and picaninny, having them seem childlike, ignorant, and harmless. In short, they made them appear to be in need of paternalistic care that the system provided. (Pilgrim, “The Brute Caricature”, par 2)

The Impact of the Civil War

Slavery was overthrown in the South by force of arms. Slave owners were prevented from holding office and were not compensated for their loss of their slave property. Former slaves received full citizenship and the right to vote. Whites resisted the changes imposed upon them in the Reconstruction any way they could, trying to reestablish slavery in a new guise. Northerners, accordingly, did everything in their power to encourage free labour. However, their efforts resulted in landlords and labourers adopting a system of sharecropping, which kept southerners in poverty for decades. (Mintz, “Emancipation in Comparative Perspective”, Hypertext History, par 1,2,8)

Many whites argued that without slavery blacks were reverting back to their basic animalistic nature. They spread the notion that blacks as a race were animalistic and violent with an insatiable lust. Anti-black propaganda, such as that of the Ku Klux Klan’s, novels and respectable journals alike, focused on the stereotype of the black rapist that attacked white women in increasing numbers, which became the public rationalization for lynching blacks. “Lynchings often involved castration, amputation of hands and feet, spearing with long nails and sharpened steel rods, removal of eyes, beating with blunt instruments, shooting with bullets, burning at the stake, and hanging.” The brutality of lynchings made it necessary to make the victims seem equally brutal. (Pilgrim, “The Brute Caricature”, par 3-4, 17)

On the other hand, Reconstruction did have its positive effects. African-Americans established churches and schools which later became the institutional basis for challenging segregation, while the constitutional amendments provided the legal basis. (Mintz, “Emancipation in Comparative Perspective”, Hypertext History, par 9)

The Civil Rights Movement

Jim Crow

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system that operated in the U.S., especially the South, between 1877 and the mid 1960s. Effectively, it legitimized racism, reducing the social status of African-Americans to that of second class citizens. Jim Crow was a way of life, controlling every aspect of it from where blacks could and could not go to where they could sit on the bus or in a restaurant. The rationale behind Jim Crow was that whites were God’s chosen people, superior to blacks; therefore interracial relationships had to be made impossible, so that a mixed, mongrel race could not emerge. Every law made under Jim Crow was created to make blacks feel inferior to whites, so they would not question white authority and compete against whites for political power or economic advancement. This was mostly achieved by intimidation and violence. (Pilgrim, “What was Jim Crow?”, par 1, 2)

NAACP

The NAACP was formed in response to the continued lynchings and the 1908 race riot in Springfield, by a group of whites and blacks, among them the acclaimed scholar W. E. B. Du Bois. The goal of the organization was to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of blacks and eliminate racial prejudice. Du Bois founded The Crisis magazine to serve as the voice of the organization, and published many young black authors such as Langston Hughes. Prominent members of the NAACP included Thurgood Marshal, who as a lawyer persuaded the Supreme Court in Topeka, Kansas, to rule the “separate-but-equal” practice in public schools unconstitutional. (“History of the NAACP”, par 2,5,6)  Another member, Rosa Parks, was the person who set off the Montgomery Bus Boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. (Mintz, “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”, Hypertext History, par 1,2) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., became the leader of the Civil Rights Movement due to his oratory skills as a pastor, advocating non-violent action against racial discrimination. His charisma galvanized the movement and inspired others to take action, for instance students’ “sit-in” movements that gradually ended segregation in public facilities such as restaurants or movie theaters. (Mintz, “Freedom Now”, Hypertext History, par 1,2)

Ghetto Life

From 1890 until around the 1970s African-Americans migrated from the South to North, from rural areas into the city. (Cutler, 11) A phenomenon called “white flight” accompanied blacks’ movement into the cities. It meant that when urban neighborhoods became increasingly black, whites started to move to the suburbs which in turn made certain parts of the city become heavily black-inhabited; those parts became known as “ghettos” with connotations of masses of uneducated, poor blacks living in daily exposure to crime and drug abuse.

Theories for segregation include the “Port Entry,” which argues that ghettos were the means by which groups assimilated into a new environment. “Collective Action Racism” theorizes that ghettos were the result of whites taking collective action, such as racial zoning or threatened lynching, to discourage blacks from moving into white neighborhoods. The third theory was “Decentralized Segregation” which says that segregation was enforced by individual whites who preferred to live among whites even if they had to pay more to do so. (Cutler, 18, 19, 21)

After 1970 segregation started to decline due, in part, to the increasing level of education among blacks. More educated blacks could assimilate more easily into white neighborhoods than less educated blacks. (Cutler, 15)

Acting White

In his research Roland Fryer examines what it means to “act white” for students belonging to the minority. He defines the term as “a set of social interactions in which minority adolescents who get good grades in school enjoy less social popularity than white students who do well academically.” (“Acting White”, par 3)

The problem is significant, because there is a noticeable gap between the SAT scores of whites and that of the minority; consequently the minorities are underrepresented in elite colleges and universities. (“Acting White”, par 45)

In previous studies researchers attributed this pattern in academic achievement regarding minorities to one of two things: either it resulted from white society’s racial prejudice that denied blacks the same standards that whites enjoyed, or low-achieving black communities self-sabotaged their opportunities by placing themselves in the role of victims of racial prejudice. (“Acting White”, par 11)

Fryer found that neither of these assumptions are correct, because “acting white” occurs in integrated schools where friendships are interracial, and does not occur in nearly all black schools. He argues that the reason lays behind the fact that in an achievement oriented society in which blacks’ performance was always noticeably lower than whites, when a member of such group becomes successful there is a danger that he ceases to identify with the group’s interests, thus the group looses its most successful member and group identity itself becomes endangered. To prevent this from happening, the group may try to reinforce its identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the group. (“Acting White”, par 35, 38)

Conclusion

Being black in a predominantly white America is undoubtedly hard. Blacks have to work harder and put up with more in order to achieve what many whites take for granted, history taught this to us. Still, change really is taking place. Today the most powerful woman in show business is a black woman, Oprah Winfrey. Today the most powerful man in the world is a black man, President Barack Obama.

Works Cited

Cutler, David M. and Edward L. Glaeser and Jacob L. Vigdor. The Rise and Decline of the American Ghetto. Cambridge, MA: NBER, 1997 (http://www.nber.org/papers/w5881.pdf) (19 May 2009)

Davis, Kiri. dir. A Girl Like Me. 2005. Reel Works Teen Filmmaking. (http://www.understandingrace.org/lived/video/index.html)  (1 May 2009)

Fryer, Roland G., “Acting White”. Education Next. 6.1, (Winter 2006) (http://www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/3212736.html) (9 May 2009)

History of the NAACP. (http://www.naacp.org/about/history/) (19 May 2009)

Mintz, Steven and John and Rebecca Moores. Hypertext History: Our Online American History Textbook. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/hyper_titles.cfm  (18 May 2009)

Pilgrim, David. “The Brute Caricature”. (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/brute/)  (November 2000) (1 May 2009)

---. “What Was Jim Crow?”. (http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/what.htm) (September 2000) (1 May 2009)

Works Cited

Barnett, Pamela E. “Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved.” PMLA 112. 3

(May 1997): 418-27.

Bell, Bernard W. “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of      Things Past.” African American Review 26.1, (Spring 1992): 7-9.

Bonnet, Michele. “`To take the sin out of slicing trees…’: The Law of the Tree in Beloved”.      African American Review; 31.1 (Spring 1997):41-56.

Carden, Mary Paniccia. “Models of Memory and Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison's Beloved”.  Twentieth Century Literature 45.4 (Winter 1999): 401-428.

Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. “Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved”. African American Review 26.1 (Spring 1992): 51-60.

Dobbs, Cynthia. “Toni Morrison's Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited”. African American Review 32.4 (Winter 1998): 563-578.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845. <http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html> (5^th March, 2009)

Field, Robin E. “Tracing Rape: The Trauma of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”

     Women Writing Rape: The Blog (April 2007).

     <http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/women-writing-rape/entry/robin_e_fields/> (11^th March, 2009)

Fultz, Lucille P. “Southern Ethos/Black Ethics in Toni Morrison's Fiction.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 31.2 (Fall 1998): 79-96.

Hall, Cheryl. “Beyond the `Literary Habit': Oral Tradition and Jazz in Beloved.” MELUS 19.1 (Spring 1994): 89-96.

Kang, Nancy. “To Love and be Loved”. Callaloo 26.3 (Summer 2003):  836-54.

Kitts, Lenore.  “Toni Morrison and "Sis Joe": The Musical Heritage of Paul D”. Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (Summer 2006): 495-525. Literature Online. University of Pécs, Hungary, (11^th March 2008)

     < http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/>

Mock, Michele. “Spitting Out the Seed: Ownership of Mother, Child, Breasts, Milk, and Voice in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” College Literature 23.3 (Oct 1996): 117-127. JSTOR. University of Pécs, Hungary, (17^th October, 2008)

      < http://www.jstor.org/ >

 Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage, 2005.

Sale, Maggie. “Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved.” African American Review 26.1 (Spring 1992): 41-51.

Schapiro, Barbara. “The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s   Beloved.” Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author. Eds. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Company, 2000, 155-172.

Sitter, Deborah Ayer. “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved”. African American Review 26.1 (Spring 1992): 17-29.

I just finished Magda Szabo's "The Door".

 My friends were going on and off about her work, so having been enjoying my leisure of not-having-school-for-another-two-weeks break since Santa "surprised" me with "The Door", I decided this was as good a time as any to get better acquainted with the novel.

The first two-third of the book went pretty easy, I found it highly entertaining and witty. I adore it when a book is witty and has a personality. This one surely did. Even when she was describing a truly horrid scene/experience, she was doing it in a manner and style that kept me aloof, in a way protected me from feeling the true direness of the situation. I understood the horror intellectually, but I didn't feel it.

That soon changed by the end of the novel. When the horrors of the past crept into the present I was feeling it tenfold. I still can't decide if that spoiled my enjoyment. The atmosphere definitely changed and I didn't want it to, just like the characters didn't want it to,but it was inevitable. I can see that now.

All in all "The Door" was a great reading experience, I'll be sure to read Szabó Magda's other novels as well.

Hyperreality

Today I had my very first credit card exchange at an automat and I felt, besides decidedly smug, a little worried. I mean I actually made that money, it's my scholarship, still it just seems so much ... safer... when the money comes from a drawer I can see and touch. From something that is physically there. The idea that I have money tucked away on a bank account is just so, for lack of a better expression, "hyperreal". I feel like it's not something that I really possess, that it can be easily taken away, which is silly I know, but a piece of plastic just doesn't do it for me as a physical proof.

Also, I think twice about using the money that lives in the drawer than the one that took up residence on a bank account. Again, it has something to do with the feeling that it's not really real.

Whatever.

Currently Reading Beloved By Toni Morrison see related

Charlotte and Mr. Collins – Marriage Made in Heaven?

I was always left feeling bewildered as to why Charlotte married Mr. Collins. Whether reading the book or watching the film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the minute Mr. Collins appeared he was rubbing me the wrong way. Austen describes him as “…a tall, heavy -looking young man of five-and-twenty. His hair was grave and stately, and his manners were very formal.”¹ He wasn’t much better off on-screen, either. Of course I might have been a little prejudiced. He didn’t even make an appearance, yet, when I had already decided not to like him, because, as Mr. Bennet explained, he was the one entitled to inherit the Bennet estate, being Mr. Bennet’s closest male relative. That state of affairs was one reason among many to urge the five Bennet girls to marry as well and as soon as possible. I agreed with Mrs. Bennet wholeheartedly that it was very unfair to them.

His manners and way of thinking didn’t help improve my or the Bennets’ feelings for him. Even when he was trying to pay some compliments to them, he was doing it in a manner fit to insult. I couldn’t decide, and I’m sure the Bennets felt the same way, whether I should laugh or cry, because those misguided compliments weren’t spontaneous sparkles of wit. As Mr. Collins put it: “They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible.”²

Jane Austen enlightens us along the way that Mr. Collins has other less than favourable attributes, as well. We learn that though he belonged to one of the universities he wasn’t doing particularly well, and that his “very good opinion of himself, of his authority as a clergyman, and his right as a rector, made him altogether a mixture of pride and obsequiousness, self-importance, and humility.”³

Then there is the unfortunate matter of his proposal to Elizabeth Bennet. He never once considered Elizabeth a living, breathing human being with thoughts and feelings of her own, he was thinking of her as an addition to his imaginary list of “things to attain in life.” And he was lying through his pearly whites, too. He said to her: “Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life.”⁴ As the reader knows, this statement is not true, because he asked Mrs. Bennet for Jane’s hand first, and only when this hope came to nothing did he start to contemplate asking Elizabeth, at Mrs. Bennet’s suggestion, not his own.

Now that I have listed Mr. Collins’s faults, I would like to try to find but a stray virtue, if possible. We certainly have to mention that he was a clergyman, a title respectful all on its own, and that with the duty came a suitable enough parish, and the connection to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, his well-to-do patroness. His reason for wanting to marry a Bennet girl was so that when he inherits the estate, the loss of their father “might be as little as possible”⁴, seems very thoughtful, even kind of him. Also, he was well aware of the fact that Elizabeth won’t be able to bring anything into the marriage, and he was willing to overlook this.

As I was reading and researching, it became apparent to me that to understand the reason behind Charlotte Lucas’s decision for marrying Mr. Collins, we need to understand that the 18^th century was a very different era to our own, far from being all hearts and flowers. The Bennet girls’ heritage was entailed on Mr. Collins because of the practice of the male primogeniture succession⁵, according to which the oldest male relative inherits the property, never a woman.

In Jane Austen’s time, there was no way for women to be independent. Professions, universities, politics, etc. were not open to women; therefore the only way for them to get money was through the confines of matrimony. There were relatively few women who could support themselves by inheriting their father’s fortune, and even as heiress, a woman couldn’t possibly live on her own – it would have been considered improper. She had to hire an elder woman called a “lady’s companion” until she got married, in which case the fortune became the husband’s property.⁵

The other alternative was to remain under the roof of the parental house and depend on the parents, brothers or other relatives or a “family-approved protector.”⁵

A single woman without fortune could hire herself out as a governess, i.e., a nursemaid who helped a family raising their children by teaching and taking care of them. But the problem with this job was that it was uncertain, didn’t pay very well and didn’t offer any safe living after retirement.⁵

It is now plain to see that marriage was strongly tied to financial matters, and had to be weighed against personal attraction. No sensible person would have entered into matrimony without making sure they would have a safe and regular income.

Charlotte Lucas was a very sensible person. She knew exactly how bleak her future looked. Her family had only a small fortune that was going to go to her brothers. She was 27 years old, which at that time was considered long past a woman’s peak of marrying age. Lastly, she wasn’t particularly “handsome,” so to add to her misfortunes, she didn’t even have the most valuable asset a woman can have.

For all these reasons she had a very pragmatic attitude regarding marriage. “… I am not romantic, you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins's character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.”⁶

After the marriage they both seemed happily settled. Charlotte was glad to be able to run her own home, and she persuaded her husband to spend as much time in the garden as possible, cherishing the piece and quiet she got this way. Mr. Collins was happy to have himself such an attentive wife who urged him to spend time in the garden for his health, one who also appreciated their remarkable fortune of having Lady Catherine de Bourgh as their patroness.

I don’t know if their marriage was made in heaven, but theirs seemed to me the most true to its era and therefore the most real one in the novel.

 Works Cited

1 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics), Chapter13, page 53

2 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics), Chapter14, page 55

3 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics), Chapter15, page 57

4 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics), Chapter19, page85

4 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics), Chapter19, page85

5 Notes on Education, Marriage, Status of Women, etc. www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pptopic2.html

6 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Classics), Chapter 22

Author's Note: I got a grade of 5 minus for this one.I forgot to italicize the book title in the text and there were little grammatical bits and pieces like using a comma insted of a semi-colon in paragraph 4, line 2 or writing "he wasn't doing" instead of "he didn't do". Things like that.

The Beast, the Sorcerer and the Drunkards

Post-colonial literary critics often interpret Shakespeare’s portrayal of Caliban as a representative of the natives that were invaded and oppressed by imperialism.¹

 Caliban is the son of Sycorax, a witch who ruled the island with her magic, but died some time before Prospero, a sorcerer, arrived there. Caliban is a beastlike creature, sometimes even walking on all fours, possessing considerable physical strength, but very little sense, qualities that make him barely more than an animal, certainly less than a human. All he knew was how to survive on the island, a knowledge that he eagerly shared with Prospero when the latter took Caliban in, and taught the godless savage his language, trying to plant the seeds of religion in his dark head.

“…When thou camest first,
    Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
    Water with berries in't, and teach me how
    To name the bigger light, and how the less,
    That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee
    And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,
    The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:” /Act 1, Scene 2/ ²

Despite all the efforts made on Prospero’s part, Caliban remained a child of nature at heart, relying on instincts rather than sense, still unable to distinguish between right and wrong: he tried to force himself on Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. Enraged, Prospero used his magic to enslave Caliban, punishing him with exquisite physical pain, keeping him captive in a cave and making him provide for Prospero and Miranda with food and wood for the fire. In post-colonial studies Prospero’s treatment of Caliban is exactly that of a colonizer asserting his authority over the colonized. Caliban in turn is very much the colonized, submissive but resentful, biding his time until he can strike back:

“…Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
    Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
    For I am all the subjects that you have,
    Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me
    In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
    The rest o' the island.” ³

The opportunity comes when Prospero creates a storm and has his banishers suffer a shipwreck. Though everyone makes it ashore safely, as the sorcerer planned it, they are split up. Trinculo, a jester on the ship, is the first one who discovers Caliban on the island. At first he can’t decide what kind of a creature Caliban must be (he thinks him fishlike), but knows with Old World certainty that the beast would earn him a fortune back home. An ensuing storm quickly makes him realize that he has more pressing matters to tend to, in order to spare himself from the storm he hides under Caliban’s bulk. That’s how Stephano, a friend of Trinculo’s, finds them. The two drunkards amiably offer alcohol to Caliban, who of course has never come across a liquid like that and is soon beyond plastered. Through the haze of the alcohol he sees the two men as gods who came from the moon:

“These be fine things, an if they be
    not sprites.
    That's a brave god and bears celestial liquor.
    I will kneel to him.” ⁴

Caliban now sees his chance to rebel against Prospero. Stephano believes they are the only ones who survived the shipwreck, so now he is having delusions of grandeur, fancying himself the king of the island. All they have to do now is overthrow Prospero, a task that couldn’t be easier, or so the liquor sings coursing through their veins. They don’t succeed, of course, and they can thank their lucky stars that Prospero forgives them in the end, and at last he sets Caliban free as the rightful ruler of the island.

It is hard to make up Caliban’s true character, because he is not all black and white, but rather he displays all the shades of grey. Shakespeare portrays him as a simpleton, a lowly creature, barely better than an animal that draws on instinct, being very much in touch with nature. But he is intelligent enough to be able to learn to speak, to understand intangible notions like religion and god. He is capable of feeling the pain of betrayal at Prospero’s enslavement of him. He is capable of producing a linear thought and planning a series of actions as is shown when he planned to overthrow Prospero with the help of Stephano and Trinculo. What attracted him to Prospero was the promise of safety and knowledge. After he was denied both, he tried to find a way out, and he thought that was exactly what Trinculo and Stephano offered to him manifested in the form of a bottle containing the liquor of hope and courage. He chose both of his masters, Prospero for knowledge, Stephano for revenge, and was thought being beneath both of them. Twice he trusted, and twice he was disillusioned. With the drunkards he had no chance to succeed. By Prospero, he was granted his freedom. Last, but not least, the beast proved to be far nobler than the two drunkards, and far more innocent than the sorcerer.

Exeunt

Works Cited

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest

² http://www.shakespeare-literature.com/The_Tempest/2.html

³ http://www.shakespeare-literature.com/The_Tempest/2.html

⁴ http://www.shakespeare-literature.com/The_Tempest/4.html

 Author's Note: I got a grade of 4 for this one, my teacher said that I shouldn't copy-paste in whole texts when quoting, but rather work the quoted bits into my own work. I think that's a really good advice.