Author Archives: smengist

Identity, Skin color, and Gender

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There have been overlapping themes between the three books we have read that had main character who were women of color, and the way it was handled says a lot about the authors. For one thing, Janie is a mixed-race woman as is Helga Crane. While in Quicksand, Helga’s issues with identity stemmed partially from her bi-racial identity and her inability to truly belong to either community, there were times when I completely forgot that Janie was mixed. With the exception of the constant mention of Janie’s hair, there weren’t a lot of indications of her skin tone. Helga Crane also had more pride in her beauty than Janie. They were both considered beautiful because of their abundance of while features, but only Helga Crane’s narrator constantly mentioned her beauty in such detail and frequency. The only time Janie’s resemblance to white people is mentioned is when she is with Mrs. Turner.

Mrs. Turner is basically Emma Lou. They both believe that lighter is better. The more white characteristics a black person has the better of a person they are. Mrs. Turner even tolerates rude behavior from Janie because she believes “anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times.” Janie on the other hand has absolutely no prejudices when it comes to skin tone. She doesn’t even realize that sort of prejudice exists until she meets Mrs. Turner.

The discussion on gender is also treated differently with every book. With every book we have read the mention of the different ways black women are treated from black men has become more frequent. In Quicksand Helga’s gender is not mentioned often. Although the reader clearly understands that the way Helga is treated has a connection to her gender, especially considering her appearances are mentioned so much, it is never outright mentioned. The Blacker the Berry, has a lot of mentions of race and gender. Emma Lou and her family constantly wish that she had been born a man because dark men are treated much better than dark women. When Emma Lou is in college, the narrator makes a claim that it is in fact the men who have the prejudice because they know that all “important” men have light-skinned wives and so they only look for light-skinned women. The women in actuality have no reason to be skin-prejudice except to make sure they have husbands. In Their Eyes were Watching God, the treatment Janie receives from the men around her, especially Joe Stark and Tea Cake, is closely scrutinized as being gender specific by both the narrator and even Janie herself. When Jody and the men are making fun of women, Janie breaks her silence and states that they don’t understand women.

Narrator or Author

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In our last class we discussed the line that exists between the author and the narrator. The narrator of a story is just another character of the novel. All the opinions and thoughts expressed by the narrator do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the author. This was one of the critics expressed by Du Bois for Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry. Thurman’s narrator would both criticize Emma Lou, while at the same time express her thoughts, almost always self-hating, as his/her own opinions.  In these instances it can be difficult to distinguish the author from the narrator. Had the novel been in the first person point of view, from Emma Lou’s perspective, there would not have been any accusations towards Thurman. Another example provided in class was Nabokov’s famous work, Lolita. In this case as well, the narrator, who also happens to be the main character, is often confused for the author. This caused Nabokov a lot of problems as well as creating a lot of controversy.

This brings me to The Berlin Stories. In this case the author and the narrator both share the same name and a lot of other similarities, including the experiences mentioned in the novel. Since the work is fiction, are we as the readers supposed to separate the author or from the narrator? This is made very difficult with the fact that they both share a name.

Something else I found very interesting was the fact that this is the first piece or writing that has the average man as the storyteller. Stories such as The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men have this same man. In The Great Gatsby the main character is Gatsby, but the narrator, who is also a character in the story, is Nick Carraway and in All the King’s Men, the story is about Willie Stark but the story is told by Jack Burden. Up until now, we have only had an unknown, invisible character as the narrator. This is the first instance of a character being a vessel to tell the stories of other people, such as Sally Bowles. The Berlin Stories, were published in 1945, maybe this technique is a more recent development.

Comparisons of the different Modern Movements

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In “Negro Youth Speaks”, Alain Locke introduces a new wave of black artists. This essay is very similar to Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction” as well as Oscar Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Woolf talks about recording “the atoms as they fall upon the mind” and “the incident scores upon the consciousness”. Locke describes the new young black artists as having “a deepening rather than a narrowing of social vision” as well as a an achievement of “an inner mastery of mood and spirit”. Just like high modernism, described by Woolf, the “Young Negro” creates stories that center around the individual experiences, while the black artists of the past would create stories that centered around the whole racial population.

In his preface, Wilde states that “all art is quite useless”. He makes the argument that art is not created to fix something or to make people morally correct, but simply to be admired. Locke mentions a similar idea in that the new artists do not write or create works that are meant to represent and fight for the entire black population but are simply meant to document their individualistic experiences as black people. He clarifies a fine distinction between the past writers who spoke “for the Negro” verses the new modern poets who “speak as Negroes”. The new artist have “helped in bringing of the materials of negro life out of the shambles of…cheap romance and journalism into the domain of pure and unbiassed art.”

Locke believes that this new method actually does a better job of detailing the lives of “the Negro” than any of the previous works. That in order to express what it is like to be something, for example black, it not necessary to actually talk about being that something but simply to tell an experience from the perspective of that person. “For race expression does not need to be deliberate to be vital. Indeed at its best it never is.” “Racial expression as a conscious motive…is fading out of our latest art”. Just like the previous definitions of modernism, the scope has narrowed. While previously the narrative described a group of people, the modern narrative focused on the individual perspective.

I find it very interesting that almost all of the books we have read so far had a narrator that entered at least one character’s mind and revealed their inner thoughts and feelings and yet the story, “Spunk”, provided in the “The New Negro” by Zora Neale Hurston has a narrator that is almost completely removed from the story. The narrator doesn’t even tell us all of the important information, but simply allows the characters, specifically Elijah and Walter, to describe the plot and the emotions of Joe, Spunk, and Lena. There is a lot less internal analyzing than in the previous works we have read. I’m looking forward to reading more black authors from the Modern movement to see if this pattern continues.

Inner desires

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When we were discussing the parallelism between Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus, one of the conclusions we made was that they were both “strangers” in their society. But while Septimus’ strangeness was obvious, Mrs. Dalloway’s strangeness was hidden. While on the outside she fits right into society, throwing parties, chatting with people, on the inside she has thoughts and opinions that vary from society’s expectations. Almost all of the stories we read today exhibited some disconnection between the surface and internal workings of a character.

In Illusion, Miss Bruce is the epitome of what a British woman is supposed to be. She is “utterly untouched, utterly unaffected, by anything hectic, slightly exotic or unwholesome”. The narrator even states that he/she “only knew the outside of Miss Bruce – the cool sensible, tidy English outside”. Later we find out about her dress collection and her inner passion to be beautiful. Even though she would never wear any of her dresses in public, she buys them with so much emotion and longing that is tucked away beneath a solid layer of tradition and expectations that the narrator did not notice them at all even though they had been “dining and lunching together…for two years”.

In Mixing Cocktails, the narrator desires some private time “between [her] thoughts and [her]self”, but she keeps getting interrupted. She longs to be like her aunt, who does odd things, but she is “a well-behaved little girl”. She wants to be a stranger, but she is too afraid of leaving “her shell”.

In Hunger, the narrator is struggling through hunger. She mentions having been “a mannequin” in the past, but having given that up. A mannequin could refer to the idea of living your life within expectations and basically being a carbon copy of a woman, simply a mannequin. A figure that is not human, does not have human thoughts or opinions. Having given that life up, this woman is now struggling to make money and life her life as an individual. In this case it appears this woman listened to her internal desires and shed her outer layer, but it ended up hurting her.

We see two stories of women who keep their inner desires strictly under lock and key and with the third story we understand why.

 

02/23: Modernism and Lily Bart

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              The Modernist movement championed art that revealed the workings within the mind rather than simply recreating the shallow physical world. Wharton clearly demonstrates this change in her work. Her writing explores the minds of many of her characters, seamlessly entering one mind and switching to the next. She chooses to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall” (Virginia Woolf: “Modern Fiction”). Wharton’s characters themselves also embody the spirit of modernism. Specifically Lily Bart and Lawrence Selden, not coincidentally the two characters whose inner thoughts and judgements are most represented in the novel, repeatedly evaluate and analyze the people and things that inhabit their lives. Lily, while strictly stuck within the compounds of her societal expectations, constantly expresses thoughts and ideas that explore beyond the limitations her upbringing would have suggested (“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her”). She is removed far enough from the society to be able to meticulously calculate the amount of charm and warmth necessary to soothe her fellow citizens and somehow maneuver them into giving her what she wants. Her entire interactions with Percy Gryce demonstrate these skills, and although she was unsuccessful in her mission to become his bride, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind (character or reader) that had she not hesitated she would have succeeded.
               Her hesitation also stems from her removal, or more appropriately, her distance from the societal bubble. As a result of Selden’s presence, Lily begins evaluating the future she had always strived to achieve. In chapter five during the Trenor’s dinner, Lily “saw that her sudden preoccupation with Selden was due to the fact that his presence shed a new light on her surroundings”. She compares their world to a cage, in which all the people were “like flies in a bottle, and having once flown in, could never regain their freedom.” But Selden was different, “he had never forgotten the way out”. Throughout that dinner Lily sees every person through the eyes of Selden and she begins to notice their shallow dullness. This in turn causes her to begin doubting her future goals. “She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning”. This instinctual desire for more in her life, more than the “glitter” offered by her society is  the reason for her multiple hesitations that prevent her from her possible marriages that would have guaranteed her the financial stability she longed for.  Both Selden and Lily are “strangers” in their society because of their ability to see beyond the physical. They are “strangers” because they are modernists. It was an interesting decision on Wharton’s part to have these smart individuals both end in tragedy, with one’s death and the other’s heartbreak, considering the title. They were destined for the House of Mirth.