Bastard Out of Carolina

This is by far my favorite piece that we have read in this class. I am really glad that this is how we get to end the class. There are so many themes in this book that we have encountered throughout the course of this class. Through all of the abuse that Bone deals with, both sexually; physically; and emotionally, I am really glad that Allison decided to incorperate the idea of family bonding as a security net for her.
From the very beginning of the story, even before the abuse began, Bone felt safe around her family, and really valued that time. "We lived on one porch or another all summer long, laughing at Little Earle, teasing the boys and picking over beans, listening to stories, or to the crickets beating out thier own soft songs. When I think of that summer-...-I always feel safe again" (22). Throughout the story we realize how important this sense of family, story, and security means to Bone.
Another source of bonding that seems especially important to Bone is that which she has with her mother. "If I got a permanent, I would lose those hours on Mama's lap sitting in the curve of her arm while she brushed and smoothed my hair and talked soft above me... I would have cut off my head before I let them cut my hair and lost the unspeakable pleasure of being drawn up onto Mama's lap every evening" (31). Here the reader can see how much Bone values her relationship with her mother. As the reader sees this bond build, it becomes harder to read the parts where Anney chooses not to believe how abusive Glen is with Bone. I wish that Anney would have left Glen for good in the hospital parking lot. She knew the extent of the abuse, and still took him back. I wondered while I was reading if Anney understood how important the mother/daughter bond was to Bone. If she did, why did she send Bone off to live with Ruth?
While living with her Aunt Ruth, we see Bone develop yet another family bond. This bond becomes really obvious when they are listening to music and singing together. "Every time the chorous came onb, she'd pound her hand on the couch and sing along, waving at me to join in with her. We's yell it out" (138). Bone really cares about Ruth, and Ruth decides that she is going to do whatever she can to protect Bone. So far in the story, Ruth is the closest that Bone has come to telling anyone of the abuse, and as the readers, we can see that she really wants to tell her everything. I personally think that Bone did not have to tell Ruth about the sexual abuse. She either already knew, or it didn't matter to her. The physical abuse was enough that she would tell Anney that she needed Bone's help as long as she could have it just to keep her out of that house and away from Glen. I wonder if Bone will ever tell anyone everything once she understands what is exactly going on with Glen? If she does, I think that there is a good chance that it would be her Aunt Ruth that she tells.

Cherrylog Road

I think this poem stuck out to me because it was different from the rest of them in the way that it really was as simple as it looked. The other poems by Dickey seemed to take more decoding to understand. I liked how this poem just said what it had to say, and was therefore a little easier to understand.
The tone in this poem changed a few times throughout the poem. It started out as fun. The boy was playing in the cars, pretending to be the people that once owned the cars. He was doing this while waiting for Doris to meet him. The poem also starts to build up anticipation as he waits for her.
I liked the part where Doris first arrived. She was loosening the screws, and getting car scraps to bring home to show her father that she had went to the junkyard to get things (not to meet a boy). "Through dust where the blacksnake dies
Of boredom, and the beetle knows The compost has no more life." I really liked this description. It made Doris appear really strong, and did not even notice the dust, dirt, or animals. She was definitely not being portrayed as a "typical" southern bell. She was not going to wait around, and did not need any help from a man and she was IN A JUNKYARD!
The other description that I really liked was the last stanza. "Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106, continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever." This description really represents the freedom of adolescence. It just makes us realize that Doris and the guy were not in a romantic relationship. They were just kids celebrating their adolescence and the freedom that goes along with it.

Walking on Water

I found this collection of poems to be a bit confusing. We have not done any poetry in this class yet, and it has been quite a while since I have done poetry at all. For this week's blog, I decided to write about "Walking on Water" (or at least try to.

"Walking on Water" kind of reminded me of the ending of O'Connor's "Revelation." It seemed to have some sort of religious background. Dickey talks about Heaven, and I think people (and maybe sharks) that are going there. Also the title seems to hold some sort of religious meaning. The bible talks a lot about water. Jesus walked on the water, so maybe he thinks that he is choosing who goes to heaven like he thinks he is Jesus.

The beginning of the poem seems to imply peace and serenity which is what heaven is supposed to be like. The part "the shark Lay buried and followed" also implies death. There is also the part that talks about the burning deck, reminds me of the burning bush in the bible. Altogether, I think that this poem has a very religious meaning to it, much like "Revelation." As it probably appears, I do not really know for sure what is going on in this poem, but this is my best guess.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Watching the film really gave me a much better insight as to how Williams intended to portray the characters. Blanche for example was really crazy in the film. When I was reading the play, I did not think that she was all that crazy. Just watching her eyes and the way they would roll and look like they came out of her head made her look like a mass murderer.

When I read the play, I felt bad for Blanche after her sister made her out to be a liar and sent her to an institution. After watching the film, I do not really care if Blanche was raped or not, she needed to be sent to an asylum. However, I think that Stella, Stanley, and Mitch needed to join her there. All four characters were made to appear insane in the film. I did not find that to be the case while reading the play.

The reading made the situations and characters seem more realistic and natural. The film however really showed the characters "acting." Everything we saw seemed forced and very fake. I think that this took away from the play. Mitch for example played a very fake role. When he danced up to the door, it just did not seem to fit the situation. If a guy I had just met was coming to take me out for the first time and he came dancing up to the door like some sort of clown, I would close the door in his face. When I read the play, I did not think that Mitch was crazy or as immature as he was portrayed to be in the film. He seemed very responsible and mature in the reading.

One good thing that the film did as far as portraying characters was with Stanley. He was a pig, and Blanche had every right to compare him to an animal. The only times we ever saw him without food in his mouth was when he was fighting, or being abusive. When I read the play, I thought that Blanche was just trying to make herself look better than him by putting Stanley down. After watching the film, I would agree that Stanley is a pig in every sense of the word.

blinded by the darkness

I thought that a really interesting theme from "A Streetcar Named Desire" was light. It seemed to show up at so many points and really signify an eye opener. Blanche was especially sensitive to light, and she was thus afraid of seeing the truth.
Throughout the story we see many examples of how afraid Blanche is of the truth, and of what is here and now. She is very stuck in the past. She always uses light covers, never goes out in the day time, and if she does it is only to dimly lit places. Blanche is very afraid that the light will allow someone to see that she is "putting on a front." This happened when Mitch saw her. He realized how old she was. At this point when the lights were revealed, Blanche's promiscuous past was also revealed. She can not come to the present and realize that the past is over. "I don't want realism, I want magic."
At the end of the play, we find out that Blanche was not the only one hiding in the darkness. Stella was also really irrational and couldn't believe her sister even though she kind of knew it was true on the inside. She knew that if she did believe Blanche then she couldn't go on living with Stanley.

Tennessee Williams

This piece touches upon several of the common themes that we have discovered in earlier readings. Female sexuality and gender roles seem very important thus far in the reading of "A Streetcar Named Desire." I think that Blanche is a really interesting and controversial character.

Blanche has had a very sexual life, and seems to have been shunned from society for having lived such a life. I think that she has been made to feel very subconscious about herself because of this. She constantly needs to clean herself as if "washing away her sins." When she first sees Stella in Scene one, Blanche does not want her to look at her until she has bathed and showered. When I first read this I thought it was a little strange, but did not think that much of it (maybe she was just dirty and tired from making her travel). As the play went on though, It meant more to me. She is bathing very often. Then we learn of her exploited sexuality. I read a book in high school that had a similiar theme with water and trying to wash away the "sins of one's sexuality." This made the excessive themes seem a bit more noticeable and meaningful to me.

Blanche also brings evidence of gender roles. Also in Scene One, she is looking for a drink. She reassures Stella that she "hasn't turned into a drunkard. She's just all shaken up and hot and tired and dirty!" Women were not supposed to crave alcohol (much like today). Drinking is something for men. This also raises question to Blanche's character and what kind of past she has had.
Stanley and Stella are also a good example of southern gender roles. When Stanley thinks that Blanche has taken the money that was rightfully Stella's, he feels as though he has been cheated. This is because at that time, a woman's money and state belong to her husband. We also say this in Porter's stories. The grandmother had to let her husband make all the decisions with her money even though she knew he was making poor decisions. It just was not the female role to handle money.

Hurston

Hurston has an interesting take on southern life. Her writing is very different than anything else we have read. "How it Feels to be Colored Me" shows that Hurston thinks of people as individuals, not colors. That is obvious right from the title. She is not colored black, she is colored by her individualism. This is something that has not been a common theme in the readings we have done. For example, Wright shows the differences between blacks and whites. According to Hurston, the only difference between blacks and whites was that the whites only "rode through town and never lived there" (416).

The main thing that I got from reading "How it Feels To Be Colored Me" was that Hurston did not want to define herself as "colored." She felt that this was the least important aspect that makes up a person. She would rather be defined as a woman, or an American. "I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads" (418). Hurston has a really interesting way of describing people as "paper bags." The things that make up a person are the things inside the bag.

Another interesting thing that Hurston does in this piece is kind of mock other writers of the time. "But I am not tragically colored... I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them the lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it... No, I do not weep at the world- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife" (417). I think that Hurston is taking away from writers such as Wright. She believes that the real way to make change is to overcome hardships and raise above one's race, not write about the problems. Her piece is very optimistic in the sense that everyone is in control of their own destiny.

Porter

The Porter stories touch on many of the same prominent themes of the South that we have read in many of the other stories this semester. I think the way that Porter addresses these “touchy” topics is very creative and also extremely sly. I often found myself reading about something that in other books jumped out at me as “oh, this was an important issue of the time,” and not even noticing. For example, the race relationships seemed to be more accepted between Nannie and the grandmother than they would have been portrayed by other authors. Like Chopin, Porter portrays a great deal of female strength in her writing. For example, the Grandmother took on many “manly” jobs once she received the opportunity when her husband died.
A person contradicting their beliefs also appears to be recurrent in southern literature. Jefferson for example contradicted himself often in his writings. The grandmother is very self contradicting in Porter’s stories. The reader can clearly tell that she does not necessarily approve of the rules of society, yet for some reason she follows them. I think this is because Porter has the grandmother represent the “Old South” and its values. The reader could tell that the grandmother wanted to take on more “masculine” roles, but she did not until after her husband dies, and even then she was very subtle in the roles which she took on.
I think that “The Grave” represents Miranda’s coming of age more than any other piece of Porter’s stories which we read. The reader sees how in a previous short story, “The Circus,” Miranda is very girly, and sticks to the more traditional values of femininity. She cannot even stand to sit through a circus and has to be brought home. A few stories later, she is out with he brother Paul shooting animals and rummaging through graves. I think that the grandmother’s death represented the death of the “Old South,” and the values that went along with it. Once she was dead, Miranda was freed from living up to these traditional values. Although the end of the story shows her in a way returning to those same “scared,” and “feminine” characteristics, she does break free from them and learn on her own who she really is, not who she is expected to be.

Dry September

Faulkner begins this piece by using really good imagery to set up a scene of violence and tension. This helps the reader by foreshadowing the horrible act of violence that is about to happen. This appears to be a recurrent theme in many of the stories we have read in class this semester. For example, Poe uses a lot of imagery when describing the house to set the reader up for the strange events that are about to occur. Many other authors who’s work we have read use imagery not to foreshadow violence. In fact I cannot recall a piece of work we have read this semester that did not use excellent imagery. Sometimes it was even too good, like in Douglass’ narrative. So if I had to make a conclusion about southern literature right now, I would have to say that imagery is a really important tool that the authors use.

Faulkner’s “Dry September” does an excellent job at demonstrating how lynching and such violent acts were a public affair. These horrible acts were used as social control to keep the African Americans scared and in line. For example, when Miss Minnie Cooper went out with her friends and they were walking: “There’s not a negro on the square. Not one.” That shows that this threat of violence was enough to scare them out of the streets, so therefore it was accomplishing its goal.

Not only does Faulkner show that these violent acts are a social event, but he also shows that there is a lot of male pride and pressure involved, and how irrational people can become. The barber was concerned with getting all of the facts and being rational about the situation, but he was ridiculed by the other men. McLendon was the least rational, and most influential and pressuring about the situation. “Happen? What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?” Moments later McLendon is cursing the others who will not join him until they do.

I think that Faulkner is trying to show how irrational and out of control this violence was. If this is what he was trying to do, in my opinion he did a really good job because that is exactly the idea I got from reading “Dry September.”

Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin appears to have a very interesting way of writing. I have read a few of her other pieces in the past, and these two seem to follow suit. I like the way she uses little (or big) twists to keep the reader interested and looking for more.
Chopin was a very different writer for her time, which probably explains why many of her pieces were not widely published right when they were written, for example “The Storm.” Chopin writes about things that were virtually unspoken of in the 1800’s.

“The generous abundance of her passion without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached. When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her mouth was a fountain of delight...” (307-8).

Most likely if we were to read 100 books published in the 1800’s, very few would be on the topic of such passion, and even fewer would use such language. I think that this is strange. Looking at this section from a twenty-first century point of view we would not call this graphic, but considering the time and place, it was.

Not only was this short story on an unspoken of topic, but this particular display of passion was out of class, which adds to the reasons why it would not have been very popular at the time it was written. I think Kate Chopin was trying to prove something with her writing. She knew there were things going on which many people were either unaware of, or did not even want to think was happening, and I think she was trying to kind of say “look! This is how it is. Get used to it!”

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher is a really interesting story. There are so many different ways one could interpret the story, which I think adds to the story. I think it is always more fun to discuss a story when everyone has a different idea as to what happened in it, and each idea could possibly be right.
This story starts out by introducing the house of Usher as a character in itself. This is interesting because the “house” probably has a double meaning in the title. It probably represents the family and the house. By making the house not only a character, but the first character (other than the narrator) of the story it shows just how important this house was to the family. It appears as though in a way, it was the family.
I thought it was particularly strange that the narrator and Usher were good friends when they were younger, but the narrator did not know that Usher had a sister, a twin sister at that. It seems as if a close friend should know if one has a sister, especially if that sister is the same age. This makes me believe that the sister was only a ghost. There were a lot of things that went on in the house that would make one think that the narrator was creating things within his own mind that were not really happening.
It was very strange that there was a room “...carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been so similarly protected.” It was almost as though the room was made to burry people alive so they could not escape. Yet somehow, Madeline was able to escape. (Maybe because she did not exist in the first place.)
I think Poe is an amazing writer, and have been a fan of his pieces since the first time I read one, but I am not going to pretend that they are not incredibly strange! Personally, I think that this strangeness is what makes them so good, because once again that is something that allows for so many different interpretations of the work.

George Fitzhugh

Personally, I think that Fitzhugh has a very interesting perspective. I am not saying that I agree with him, just that I think it is something very different and also intriguing. I completely understand where his ideas are coming from. The southern economy flourished during slavery, and has never been able to match its prosperity since. Obviously slavery is wrong and immoral, but looking at it from a completely economic standpoint, there were many benefits. Fitzhugh had a fascinating outlook that slavery should not have been about race, it should have been about economics.I think that fitzhugh was trying to say that the work needed to be done, regardless of who was doing it.

Fitzhugh viewed the south as a “mother figure.” This is understandable; the south was much more prosperous than other “countries” at that time, and Fitzhugh believed that was because of their view on slavery. Fitzhugh thought that other states should look to them for advice and guidance, like one would look to their mother. I think that another way to look at his calling the south “she” and “her” would be to make it appear more nurturing, also like a mother.

In Fitzhugh’s eyes, the south took care of their slaves, and thus flourished. “She flourishes like the bay tree, whilst Europe starves, and she is as remarkable for her exemption from crime as her freedom from poverty. She is by far, very far, the most prosperous and happy country in the world. Her jealous ad dependent rivals have begun to imitate her. They must soon openly approve her course in order to vindicate themselves (Fitzhugh). When, and only when Europe looks to the south for guidance, they could possibly flourish as well.

John Smith

The two John Smith pieces we read for class had a similar purpose. In class we decided that this purpose was to convince others to come and populate America. The only problem I have with this is that personally if i was in Europe and heard the "The Generall Historie of Virginia" I would not want to come to America. I do not think that coming to a new land and getting captured and almost killed by natives would be very fun or exciting. However, I do know some people who would, so I suppose this is a valid conclusion of the purpose of the two pieces. I also agree that this is valid for the first story "A Description of New England." This piece uses a great deal of exaggeration to instill hope or almost certain success in those who may come to America.

I think that it was a really good idea for John Smith to use third person narrative in "The Generall Historie of Virginia." Had he not done this, the story would not have been nearly as successful as it has been. I would not enjoy reading a story where a guy is telling how great he is and how much of a hero he should be considered (that is too cocky!). By making himself a character in the story, it was much more effective, and people are much less likely to become repulsed by the character and the story.

I thought it was really interesting that the titles did not match up with the writings. The first piece, "A Description of New England" was spelled "correctly," while the entire story was not. However, "The Generall Historie of Virginia" is not spelled "correctly," but the rest of the story is. I thought this was really interesting. I have no idea why this would be, but it was just something that made me curious.