Babies Broken like Shards of SeaShells

Everyone in class feels uncomfortable about Toni Morrison's piece, but the sex scenes don't really weird me out.  Maybe the source of my desensitized perspective can be accredited to watching all six seasons of Sex and the City.  Or maybe it stems from my deep pre-existing disgust with rape and the intense sympathy I already feel for victims of sexual assault.  The truth is, I've already been shocked.  Seriously, one time, I read the first twelve pages of The Lovely Bones at a track meet and I was rattled for the rest of the season.   (For those of you who don't know, the beginning of  The Lovely Bones contains a scene in which a 14 year old girl is raped by her neighbor in a bunker he built in the field behind his house, and then he chops her up into pieces and scattered her limbs benethe his yard).   

Anyways, I’m tough to crack.  But this week, upon reading the line in which Cholly’s mother “wrapped him in two blankets and one newspaper and placed him on a junk heap by the railroad,” I finally felt the horrors and adversity faced by minorities.  Morrison artfully constructed this image in my mind of a helpless infant –maybe crying, maybe sleeping, but nonetheless, alive—being placed on the ground.  It’s little baby face probably got all dirty, maybe a fly even landed on its lips.  The thought of the plain mistreatment of this baby was more than unsettling, but then to realize that this baby was abandoned (or at least almost abandoned) broke my heart.  Maybe Toni Morrison wasn’t suggesting this, but from reading that the baby was placed specifically at “heap by the railroad”, I concluded that this baby was going to get run over by a train.  And then, as grotesque as it is, I imagined that bloody, baby body in a heap of dismantled baby limbs and I could’ve thrown up. 

I realize that this baby was Cholly and he grew up to be a terrible man, but he was a baby too, once, and no one deserves to be obliterated on the side of the road at only four days old, so I felt deeply appalled at his mistreatment.  Toni Morrison purposefully evokes sympathetic feelings for Cholly by beginning the chapter with this line so that the reader can better grasp his perspective with an unbiased outlook.  Morrison often strips away the meanness in adult characters by telling their backstory in intense detail.  In addition to providing background for Cholly, she also devotes chapters to the lives of Pauline and Junior.  Even though Cholly, Polly, and Junior inflict abuses on Pecola, after reading each of these chapters, I always feel more sympathy for the character than I had before.  Morrison does this to de-antagonize each of her characters to demonstrate the role societal guidelines play in deteriorating the innocence and goodness of the people. 
This isn’t a tragic novel about the rape of a teenage girl, it is an exposure of the flawed nature of  society and an unveiling of the personal, far-reaching effects of racism.     

The Difference between a Sea and an Ocean

I am floored by how skillfully crafted Toni Morrison’s writing is.  It is probably the most beautiful, accurate writing I’ve ever encountered.  One thing in particular that impresses me is her ability to define the indescribable divides society naturally draws to silently and methodically perpetuate the state of inferiority of the weak and helpless.

She shows the difference between what it means to be “put out” and to be “put outdoors (17).”  When you are put out, you still have to freedom and ability to “go somewhere else.”  I imagine this type of situation would occur when a father loses his job, because although the family has been knocked down a little bit, they can still stand strong together because of their firm grasp on control and “ownership” (20) of their own life.  However, when you are put outdoors, you are completely banished from the safe bubble of society, and “there is no place to go.”  Pecola belongs in the group of people who have been “put outdoors”, and I think this distinction is important for emphasizing her helplessness because it shows that in addition to automatically being rejected from the white world for being black, she is rejected from the black community because of her irrevocably horrible predicament.  Understanding that Pecola is at the very bottom of the caste system—practically outside of it—generates more sympathy for her from the reader and sharpens the reader’s view of her as a wounded innocent, making each blow to Pecola even more uncomfortable for the reader to silently witness.  For example, when Pecola is awkwardly listening to Mama’s cruel rant about the lowliness of the Breedloves, Pecola begins “minstratin’”(27).  This incident is the icing on Pecola’s cake of vulnerability, as it only increases her state of helpless embarrassment.  This image created of a little black girl, rejected from society and apart from her family, quietly crying as some strange woman who is supposed to be her care taker screams insults about her is incredibly painful for the reader to bear witness to.  And then to make things even worse, at this impromptu time, Morrison bequeaths upon Pecola an event that is agreeably the most embarrassing situation for any woman: getting a period.  Through the use of definition and example, Morrison successfully conveys the rejection of minority groups from society and conjures mounting sympathy from the reader for Pecola to communicate the naked horrors or racism. 

 

All Mermaids have Tails

Everyone knows Barbie.  Her voluminous blonde hair, cunning aqua eyes, and thin figure make her the epitome of beauty and sex appeal in America.  Her name has become synonymous with good-looking; heck, if someone told me I looked like a Barbie doll, it’d probably make my day.  How could it not when I have been shown that models that resemble Barbie (for example, Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid) can make millions of dollars just because of their looks? 

Gigi Hadid

 

Kendall Jenner

  

 

 Society has accepted the Barbie as the standard for beauty, and her impossibly unattainable measurements of “a thirty-nine-inch bust and a twenty-three-inch waist (354)” play on the insecurities of young women to maintain the competition that exists among them to achieve male approval and adoration.  After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that any wealthy man must be in want of a wife, right?

  However, once upon a time, Barbie was seen as an element of the feminist movement.  Her rebelliously scandalous clothing and independent career paths made her the model liberated woman.  Her mere existence was a visual rhetoric against the idea that women had to be complacent, casserole-baking, apron-wearing mothers. 

 

 Barbie was successful in contributing to the destruction of the image of women as wives and mothers, but her oversexualized nature gave way to sexism.  Men manipulated her empowering stance as a beauty icon, and turned her into a standard to be followed.  Today, the feminist movement is working to reverse the damage these expectations have inflicted on women (eating disorders and self-loathing) by drilling one ideal: equality is derived from the freedom of choice.  Girls today are encouraged to be whatever makes them happy, whether that be a stripper, housewife, or astronaut, it is their choice, and whatever they choose does not make them any less powerful as a woman.  If you want to be a porn star, you are no less worthy of respect than Hilary Clinton.  It’s 2016, girls, anyone who tells you to adhere to certain standards must be seeing purple elephants, because women today are saying NO to traditional guidelines for beauty.  Ashley Graham was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, Madeline Stuart walked the runway during New York fashion week, and Alicia Keys is leading the no make-up movement. 

Madeline Stuart, model with down syndrome, on the runway

 

Curvy model Ashley Graham

Alicia Keys with no make up

Change is in motion, and beauty is no longer exclusively defined by long hair, tiny waists, and big breasts.  Mattel has even acknowledged this change by producing a new line of Barbies that more realistically represent women’s various body types.  Jesus may have made all of us different, but he made all of us beautiful. 

 

 

 

 

Today, feminists strive to create a society in which women of all sizes, skin colors, and professions are viewed as equally feminine and beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Race is as Fluid as Water

Is race a socially constructed concept? I was asked this in English class this week and before I could answer it, I had to decide what I considered race to be.

Particularly, I thought about how the concept of race originated, and I was reminded of a time when I was babysitting.

My Caucasian 2 year old cousin once went to the park and saw an African American 2 year old girl.  He stared at her, in awe of her dark skin.  He didn’t mean to be rude, he just didn’t have the words to articulate what he was seeing. But he knew that they were different.  Not that he was better than her or she deserved special treatment, just that they were different.  So, they continued to play alongside each other.

I imagine this exchange would perfectly model how cavemen acted when they first encountered cavemen who looked different.  They probably saw a difference, and didn’t have words to label it, so they all hunted together, fought together, and died together.

So the differences have always been there.  Different skin, hair, eyes, heights; there’s no denying that we are different.  It’s our biology.

However, there came a point in history when some “good guys with big guns” went “looking for a reason” (Atlantic Journal http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we-mean-when-we-say-race-is-a-social-construct/275872/).

 
These guys gave differences a meaning.  They picked which difference should define a person, (not height or weight, but skin color) and used that as their reason to be greedy and cruel, to take everything and anything they wanted from someone else.

 So basically, race, how we view ourselves in contrast to others, is an idea predisposed by society that is simply passed down from generation to generation.  But at the end of the day, race isn’t real.

When Ms.Valentino asked us,  "how many races are there?", we eagerly responded with answers like "100!" and "too many to count!" But then she said, "trick question, there is only one race: the human race." 

We all felt stupid for failing to grasp that universal truth.  Instead, we were seeing the obvious differences between people who live in Sweeden and people who live in India.  We were counting the many divisions that have been drawn to separate us by our differences.  We were only regurgitating what our parents and our presidents and anyone who uses the words “black” and “Asian” and “white” to classify any human being have engrained into our minds. 

 

Because race isn’t real.  It only exists through the eyes of the beholder.  Someone considered dark-skinned in Michigan may be considered light-skinned in South Africa.  And an Italian in America may be an American in Italy.  Our race is defined by those around us. 

 

Just like in Maus, the Germans saw the prisoner as a Jew, even though he claimed he was a German.  The Nazis enslaved several Germans and Poles alongside Jews because in their minds, the definition of “Jew” was expanded to contain anyone who resisted their rule. 

 

Race is only words created by society to divide us. 

A Survivor's Scream Heard Through a Mouse's Squeak

While Anja and Vladek are hiding in Mrs. Motonowa’s cellar, they find rats living among them.  Anja is hysterical, so to make her “feel more easy”, Vladek lies and tells her that “they’re just mice”, even though “of course, it was really rats”.   This is symbolic of Art Spiegelman’s choice to use mice rather than people in his comic. Harm inflicted on mice is much easier to witness than harm inflicted on human beings, so by drawing mice instead of people, Spiegelman is lessening the weight of the Holocaust for the reader, making it easier for them to swallow, just as Vladek is easing Anja’s nerves. 

Isn't this more depressing to look at than just mice?  You can see the sadness in their sullen faces and the weakness in their ever-so human bodies.

Also, I found it interesting that Spiegelman digresses from his metaphor and acknowledges the existence of mice in their animalistic form by including a drawing of a mouse on all fours.  We are used to seeing his anthropomorphic mice dressed nicely in top hats and trench coats, talking and smoking and typing up graphic novels.  However, on this page, Spiegelman has drawn an enormously scary mouse.  It has bushy, black fur, a dark, menacing face, and a scaly tail.  The mouse looks dirty and savageous, and it marks a stark contrast to the following frame, in which Art and his father are depicted as clean, white mice, holding a conversation. 

 

 

 This break in the mouse-as-people metaphor is a representation of the uncontainable horrors faced by Jews during the Holocaust.  At this point, Spiegelman has broken form because of the overflowing grief and guilt that has manifested within him from hearing his father’s story.  In Volume II, Art even has to start seeing a therapist because the overwhelmingly large weight of the Holocaust makes it hard for him to take pleasure in his own life.  Even after his first MAUS book achieved great success, Art feels like no matter what he does, “it doesn’t seem like much compared to surviving Auschwitz”(44).

  To demonstrate Art’s internal struggle to hold down the facts, the mouse is not boxed or captioned, and it is kind of leaking from the comic, in order to represent Art’s sorrow leaking into his writing.  Also, there is no page number on this page because the grief felt by Art, his father, Anja, and all other Jews was real, just as the mouse drawn is real mouse, and the real events depicted in the comic happened to real people.  Therefore, they are not merely part of a plot in a storybook. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”  And although the anthropomorphism has been effective in demonstrating the vulnerability of the Jews in the claws of the Nazi-cats throughout the comic, in this scene, an image of the dirty mouse and Anja’s “AIEE!” gives the reader a clearer sense of how terrible the Holocaust was for Vladek in that Polish woman’s freezing cold rat-infested cellar, and makes the events more real, because it reminds the reader that mice are truly just animals, and the Holocaust was truly happening to humans. 

On a final note, I think that this comic itself represents the Holocaust through a “scream” rather than a “thesis” because of its unorthodox nature.

 

 

 

Women in the Water

The "Woman Warrior" from Maxine Hang Kingston's novel, White Tigers, was beautifully written.  I honestly had fun dissecting the whopping 30 pages for symbolism and character development.  It was exciting when the meaning of a puzzling line finally clicked. 

Kingston connects herself to Fa Mu Lan by embodying Fa Mu Lan's point of view when narrating her fable.  In the beginning, Fa Mu Lan is merely a seven year old girl, oppressed in Chinese culture like so many others of her same sex.  The author seamlessly transitions from her own point of view, talking of her mother's "talk-stories" and her advice at the very start of the piece that all women failed if they grew up to be anything but "wives or slaves", to telling the story of Fa Mu Lan, without ever really indicating a change in character.  Kingston remains in first person point of view when telling her own personal narrative and the fable of Fa Mu Lan to show that her and Fa Mu Lan face the same obstacles in society as Chinese women.  This is significant because Kingston wrote this piece in 1970s, an era in which everyone thought all the wrongs of previous decades had finally been righted by the tumultuous civil rights movements of the 1960s.  However, by highlighting the similarities between Fa Mu Lan and herself, Kingston is revealing the sad truth that life for Chinese women living in modern day America is not so different from that of a woman living under the harsh Han dynasty.

 

And on the Third Day, He Named the Gathered Water 'Sea'

In "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience", Henry David Thoreau uses God as a motif throughout the piece in order to draw parallels between the American government and totalitarian regimes.  Thoreau states that if the people cannot be moved to change their government, it is "the will of God"(1019) that the government be obeyed.  This alludes to the concept of divine right, the belief that a monarch receives their right to rule from God, and anyone who takes a stance against the monarch is transitively taking a stance against God.  America was founded upon opposing these principles, and it is the common patriot's belief that America is the best country because they have defied these rulers.  However, according to Thoreau, the common American has "drifted from his position" of fervently fighting for his rights and has allowed the government to turn into an expedient.  Therefore, by their lack of action, Thoreau is accusing the American people of fostering a totalitarian-like government. In addition, Thoreau claims that taking action instead of merely voting for a matter divides "states and churches" (1022), and separates the "diabolical" in a man from the "divine."  The separation of church and state represents the difference between a true democracy and a totalitarian government, in which kings and queens derive their power from God.  Here, Thoreau is implying that taking action is what makes an American a true American.  Moreover, he divides the diabolical in a man from the divine.  Although diabolic is defined as "so evil as to recall the Devil," and the devil was greatly looked down upon by 19th century Americans, I think that Thoreau's utilization of this contradictory word was not on accident.  By encouraging men to bring out their diabolical side, he is encouraging rebellion against society, and in turn, the government.  He is not asking men to remain divine and proper. Rather, he is asking them to put down their feather pens, get their hands dirty, and take action.  Finally, Thoreau states that those who use rationale opposed to action are "as likely to serve the Devil as God" (1018).  Again, Thoreau is bashing those who refuse to man up and take action against a force they know is immoral.  He brings the Devil and God to close proximity with one another to show that there is no difference between a corrupt totalitarian regime and America's seemingly just system.The motif of providence effectively threads Thoreau's call to action to mend the government.