Reflection

Here we are on the final day of class. I have enjoyed this experience thoroughly, and I can confidently say that it has strengthened my knowledge and matured my views towards feminism, slavery, motherhood and marriage. I really liked how the course tended to tie the struggles of those oppressed by slavery and the efforts of women trying to break through the 'glass ceiling' and the subjugations of society. Both struggles revolved around the concepts of patriarchy, and I found that to be extremely convincing.

I appreciated the small class discussion atmosphere more than anything else. The opportunity to openly express ones opinions and interpretations, I believe, is the best way to reinforce ones views on different works of literature. Absorbing my colleague's interpretations of the same readings, especially with a class as diverse as ours, gave me perspectives that I have never been able to see from.

Overall, this course was by far the most enjoyable English/Writing experience I have had, and it far exceeded my expectations. Thanks, Katie!

Women of Color

Leading into the final week of "Women in Literature," it is only appropriate that we shift the focus of our readings to today's women of different colors around the world. In today's age of globalization, recognizing the similarities and differences between women of different colors and cultures has become more important in understanding the women of today. In this week's readings, we compare the various circumstances involving women of Chinese, Mexican and Native American descent.

In Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman," the Chinese woman's place in society is very well portrayed as rigid and scrutinized. The main character's aunt has "no name" because her family chose to disown her completely. Having had exposure to Pakistani and Indian cultures, I can attest to the fact that Eastern families traditionally expect women to be completely obedient to their husbands and families and they scrutinize women openly for any "sin" committed. It is crucial to note that we don't know whether the aunt was raped or whether she openly conceded to an affair with another man. If we try to put ourselves in her shoes, we see that it is highly unlikely that she would have openly agreed to an affair simply because she knew the consequences. Especially in joint-family systems, which are still very common in Eastern societies, all women, and mostly younger married women, are expected to be completely submissive and pure. Kingston's imagination dominates the end of this story, where she imagines how her aunt was thrown out of the house and how she gave birth to her child and subsequently committed suicide with the child. This pessimism parallels Kingston's view of the traditional treatment of Chinese women.

In Sandra Cisneros' "Woman Hollering Creek," we see how a Mexican woman named Cleofilas changes after marriage. Cleofilas tries very hard to live her life like the women of the "telenovelas," or soap operas, which she used to watch with her girlfriends. Her husband proves to be nothing like the men of the telenovelas, but Cleofilas does her best to cope with the marriage. As we read the story, the words become jumbled and it is often difficult to deduce exactly what is going on and/or what Cleofilas is feeling. This likely represents Cleofilas confusion with her marriage and with life. Her husband beats her regularly, and her doctor, noticing the bruises, arranges to have her taken back home. Instead of resorting to suicide, Cleofilas finds hope in escaping from her husband and going back home over the border. The story ends with Cleofilas in a pickup truck with Felice, the single woman in charge of helping her escape. The image of the "woman hollering creek," I believe, symbolizes the anguish of a woman. Cleofilas sits quietly in the truck as she escapes while Felice's "hollering" continues, possibly due to some hidden anguish in Felice's life.

Joy Harjo's literature is very unique in comparison to that of Kingston and Cisernos. Of the three readings, I found "The Naming" to be the most vivid. Native American culture is unique in its integration of Mother Nature with Human Nature. In naming her granddaughter, the main character "think(s) of names that have profoundly changes the direction of disaster. Of the raw whirling wind outlining femaleness emerging from the underworld." She constantly refers to her grandmother, who seems to have a dark, yet interesting past. Although her grandmother may have hated her mother (the grandmother's only daughter), the main character "[begins] to have compassion for this woman who was weighted down with seven children and no opportunities." She feels compassion for her grandmother who had to give birth to a dead, illegitimate child after being beaten in the womb by her husband for committing adultery. Her compassion for her grandmother guides her naming her child, who is "of [her] grandmother, of [her] mother." However short it may be, this story vividly portrays the respect a woman has for her grandmother and the influence her grandmother has over the naming of her child.

Color is a word with so many meanings. Women of different colors have stories of optimism and pessimism, of joy and fear. Kingston, Cisernos and Harjo, among many others, do an excellent job in bringing these stories to us.

"Rectatif"

I never saw it coming. Even after reading it, I couldn't believe what I had read. "What the hell happened to Maggie?" Why is Maggie such a pivotal character in Toni Morrison's "Rectatif?" What does she represent? Was she black or white? Did she fall or was she beaten?

I tried reading Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" after reading "Rectatif," but I couldn't get Maggie out of my head. So I figured I had to blog about it...get it out of my system.

Maggie, the mute (and apparently, deaf) cook at the orphanage where Twyla and Reberta first meet when they are eight, never actually makes much of an appearance in the story. It is only long after we leave the orphanage scene that Maggie starts to make it to the forefront of the plot, that is, when Roberta and Twyla meet each other for the second time after the orphanage and have lunch together. Roberta thinks Maggie was beaten by the "big girls" in the orchard while Twyla is convinced that Maggie fell on accident. Later we find out that Roberta thinks Maggie was black while Twyla thinks she was white.

Here's my interpretation. Twyla and Roberta look towards Maggie as a friend when they live in the orphanage. They see her as a struggling woman among the "orchard" of "big girls" and "real orphans." Both Twyla and Roberta sympathize with Maggie, and being as young, innocent, and isolated as they were, they did not see Maggie for her color, they saw her for who she was.

Between Twyla and Roberta, Twyla seems to have a much more mature outlook on life in general. She despises her mother for her inappropriate clothing, works at Howard Johnson in her young days, and eventually marries a fireman and has a child. It is interesting, then, to see that Twyla does not remember the hostility of Maggie's incident, but rather remembers feeling sympathy for Maggie for falling.

Roberta, on the other hand, tends to be a very aggressive person. She attends Jimi Hendrix concerts, grows up to marry a widowed man (obviously for the money), and has two servants and a limousine. She specifically remembers Maggie being black and being knocked down and beaten up by the "big girls." Again, we see that Roberta's recollection of Maggie's incident parallels her personality.

These recollections converge towards the end of the story when both Roberta and Twyla are nearly convinced that Maggie was black and that she was beaten up. This conclusion comes just after both women attend protests over black-white integration in public schools. Having been exposed to the true cruelties of racism and other forms of oppression, both women are subconsciously veered into accepting that Maggie was black and that she was in fact beaten.

My interpretation doesn't explain the last paragraph of the story, however. I'll share my thoughts on that later.

"Indissoluble Matrimony"

The title of this short story speaks for itself. Matrimony, in its establishment, was meant to be indissoluble, that is, unbreakable. In her short story, Rebecca West portrays a couple with obviously stark differences in their nature who break out in a fight, either literally or metaphorically. After breaking multiple bones and escaping the grips of death several times, the husband, George Silverton, still comes home, gets undressed, gets in bed and is "caressed" by Evadne's (his wife's) warm arms.

The beauty of the two characters in this relationship is this: the husband tends to be relatively weak and cowardly while the wife tends to be prudent and commanding. Yet the husband continues to try to exert his control over the relationship. It is this inconsistent clashing of natures that causes them to fight. If the husband were completely dominant, the wife would have submissively obeyed him and would have never stepped out of the house. This is not how a healthy relationship should be. There is nothing wrong with a little (or big) fight every once in awhile. After all, we are all beasts. A husband and wife should be able to fight with each other and still be able to sleep in the same bed together at the end of the day. I'm not entirely sure if this is the theme Rebecca West is trying to convey, but that is certainly what the story conveyed to me.

I do believe that West unequivocally portrays George Silverton as the enemy here, but the reader needs to look beyond that. Although the story is written entirely in the third-person, its entire focus lies on George's emotions. We are never really thrown into Evadne's thoughts. We as readers must judge for ourselves whether Evadne is truly perfect and her husband is slightly psychotic, or whether both George and Evadne have their own faults. Or, one may ask, do either of them really have any faults at all? Is fighting just a way for each of them to vent their frustrations with life?

Again, I'm not sure if my interpretation is anywhere close to what West was implying, but I believe the take home message of this tremendous short story is this: Fighting is a healthy, natural part of a successful marriage, and it is ideal for a man to be slightly submissive and a woman to be slightly dominant in order to counter the societal effects of patriarchy.

Virginia Woolf - Women as Writers

Virginia Woolf's "From A Room of One's Own" and "Professions of Women" are both very convincing works of literature. In the first essay, she begins by chronicling her readings of the historian Professor Trevelyan. In this historian's book History of England, Woolf finds that women are portrayed as "...heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme." She goes on to claim that these women are works of fiction and that the real women of this Elizabethan era were in fact "locked up, beaten, and flung about the room." It is very intriguing how Woolf descries women as only considered of high importance in imagination, but that when it really comes down to it, a woman is practically "insignificant." She is a "worm wingled like an eagle." Sifting through the history book, she reads us the table of contents, citing chapters such as "The Crusasdes...The University...The House of Commons...The Hundred Years' War..." Great women like Elizabeth and Mary were mentioned here and there, but that was it. Woolf is obviously ashamed.

The most interesting aspect of this essay, I found, was her description of Shakespeare's gifted (yet oppressed and eventually suicidal) sister, Judith. When Woolf writes, "any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at." She goes on. I could not help but recall Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." I think Woolf is trying to hint at something. She is not implying that only a genius can achieve greatness, but anyone can. We are all capable of emotion. We are all conscious human beings with "brains and character," as she puts it. Women just do not have the opportunity in this patriarchal society to express and freely portray that emotion, wit and creativity as a man can. Her point is very well taken.

In "Professions of Women," Woolf describes two experiences, "The first--killing The Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet." The Angel in the House, as I interpreted it, is a subconscious "phantom" woman that tries to skew Woolf's writing when she is trying to compose a review of a book written by a man. Woolf wants to write with a mind of her own. She wants to analyze the book objectively, not subjectively. She tries hard to void her review of opinion and prejudice, and according to her, she achieves that goal.
She then describes a sort of trance that a writer goes through before finally being enlightened. A woman, she claims, usually runs into a dead end with an "explosion" of "foam and confusion." She writes that "though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women." I feel that Woolf is trying to imply that women have become desensitized by man's dominance in society. Women's imagination cannot run wild, and it is difficult from them to put creativity in writing due to this subconscious sentiment that they are, in fact, considered inferior in their society. I do frankly have trouble completely understanding what Woolf is getting at here.

Either way, Woolf was undeniably one of the most prolific writers of her time. Time permitting, I certainly intend to read more of her works.

Nature vs. Nurture: Judith Murray's Argument

Judith Sargent Murray's "On the Equality of Sexes" begins with a poem and expands into a fiery attack on society's urge to educate men and leave women to work domestic lives. She claims that intellect is composed of four heads--imagination, reason, memory and judgment. I found interesting her argument that fashion, something women have always dominated, is a concrete example of invention, a subset of imagination.

Murray's rhetorical fashion is a key to her successful writing. She asks the reader, "Is the needle and kitchen sufficient to employ the operations of a soul thus organized?" and "'But our judgment is not so strong--we do not distinguish so well.'--Yet it may be questioned, from what doth this superiority in this determining factor of the soul, proceed?" This rhetoric almost forces the reader to question his/her own stereotypes and judgments, which I find to be very effective.

Her argument revolves around the fact that it is the lack of proper education, not the nature of women, that puts women lower than men in society. She says men and women are born equal in the eyes of God. Social and intrafamilial relationships ultimately decide how our women develop physically, intellectually and emotionally.

Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Wow.

This story is a must read. There are two themes that Gilman dwells on: the treatment of women in the 19th century and the debilitating aspects of temporary nervous depression. As the story progresses, the two themes merge together into a gripping climax. The woman is literally caged into a room in a new house that her husband, a physician, has bought for the family. The husband consistently tells her that her condition will only get better with rest and without pen and paper. This confinement, however, rather than alleviating her psychosis, causes her to go crazy towards the end of the story. Her nervousness is evident in her constant preoccupation with the smelly, ugly yellow wallpaper in her room.

At the beginning of the story, she tells the reader that her husband was going to install different wallpaper to allow the woman to keep her mind off of it, but then she writes that her husband told her "nothing was worse for a nervous patient to give way to such fancies." As the story progresses, her abhorrence towards the yellow wallpaper grows rapidly. She begins to imagine that there are women trapped behind the ugly wallpaper, one of whom is her. In desperation, she tears the wallpaper, but tries to hide her maniacal behavior from her husband. When John comes home, he finds that the woman has locked herself into the room. Once he gets in, John faints at the sight of his wife who is exhibiting extremely psychotic behavior.

The end of this story left a lasting lump in my throat. I was so moved by Gilman's attempt at equating the limited freedoms of women to the consequences of confining a patient with temporary nervous depression. The fact that the story was written in the first-person allowed the reader to witness the inner struggles of the woman first hand. She is torn between her love for her husband and her deep concern for her own well-being. Moving, to say the least.