Discuss how each main character in “Angel” and Blackened Eye” is almost destroyed in life by unforeseen circumstances but overcomes adversity or defeat. Is the “victory” clear cut? What in each case is the mental aid to survival? Is there such a thing as a survival mentality outside fiction? Would you say Jeannette Walls has it?
READINGS:
***Angel at the Grave (YOU CAN RESEARCH ABOUT THE ARTICLE TOO)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) makes most people think—poor little rich girl —-when they hear about her life. She was raise by wealthy parents, trained and educated to be a society girl. The problem was her desire to learn, to write, to go beyond what a tutor could teach her.
Her parents despaired at her lack of interest in being selected by a perfect male suitor. Finally, at the ripe old age of 23, in 1885, she married Teddy Wharton, a wealthy “proper match,” 13 years older. She was well past the age of “being a catch”. The marriage was childless.
She finally admitted herself to S Wier Mitchell’s clinic for a “rest cure” for depression in 1898 at the age of 36. After she left the clinic uncured, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she accepted the fact that she was a gifted writer and became at one time the highest paid novelist in the country, producing a novel a year for years thereafter.
Teddy had a nervous breakdown (he was widely believed to be gay), she had a longstanding affair and they finally did what wealthy blue blood New Yorkers in Society never did. They divorced.
Wharton delighted in her freedom, settled in France, worked tirelessly in World War I, continued to write and received numerous honors—French Legion of Honor, Pulitzer Prize for Age of Innocence and was the lst woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale.
Most of her writings looked at the hypocrisy in society, particularly upper class old New York, the concept of Woman as Ornament and resulting social pressures of generational and sexual conflict.
***THE GIRL WITH THE BLACKENED EYE
Joyce Carol Oates
HIS BLACK EYE I had, once! Like a clown’s eye
painted on. Both my eyes were bruised and ugly but
the right eye was swollen almost shut, people must’ve
seen me and I wonder what they were thinking, I
mean you have to wonder. Nobody said a word, didn’t want to get involved, I guess. You have to wonder what went through their minds,
though.
Sometimes now I see myself in a mirror, like in the middle of the
night getting up to use the bathroom, I see a blurred face, a woman’s
face I don’t recognize. And I see that eye. Twenty-seven years. In America, that’s a lifetime.
T H I S W E I R D T H I N G that happened to me, fifteen years old and a sophomore at Menlo Park High, living with my family in Menlo Park, California, where Dad was a dental surgeon (which was lucky: I’d need dental and gum surgery, to repair the damage to my mouth). Weird, and wild. Ugly. I’ve never told anybody who knows me now
Especially my daughters. My husband doesn’t know, he couldn’t have handled it. We were in our late twenties when we met, no need to drag up the past. I never do. I’m not one of those. I left California for¬ever when I went to college in Vermont. My family moved, too. They live in Seattle now. There’s a stiffness between us, we never talk about that time. Never say that man’s name. So it’s like it never did happen.
Or, if it did, it happened to someone else. A high school girl in the 1970’s. A silly little girl who wore tank tops and jeans so tight she had to lie down on her bed to wriggle into them, and teased her hair into a mane. That girl. When they found me, my hair was wild and tangled like broom sage. It couldn’t be combed through, had to be cut from my head in clumps. Something sticky like cobwebs was in it. I’d been wearing it long since ninth grade and after that I kept it cut short for years. Like a guy’s hair, the back of my neck shaved and my ears showing. I’D BEEN FORCIBLY abducted at the age of fifteen. It was some¬thing that could happen to you from the outside, forcibly abducted, like being in a plane crash, or struck by lightning. There wouldn’t be any human agent, almost. The human agent wouldn’t have a name. I’d been walking through the mall parking lot to the bus stop, about S:30 P.M., a weekday, I’d come to the mall after school with some kids now I was headed home, and somehow it happened, don’t ask me how, a guy was asking me questions, or saying something, mainly I registered he was an adult my dad’s age possibly, every adult man looked like my dad’s age except obviously old white-haired men. I hadn’t any clear impression of this guy except afterward I would recall rings on his fingers which would’ve caused me to glance up at his face with interest except at that instant something slammed into the back of my head be¬hind my ear knocking me forward, and down, like he’d thrown a hook at me from in front, I was on my face on the sun-heated vinyl upholstery of a car, or a van, and another blow or blows knocked me
out. Like anesthesia, it was. You’re out.
This was the forcible abduction. How it might be described by a witness who was there, who was also the victim. But who hadn’t any memory of what happened because it happened so fast, and she hadn’t been personally involved obviously old white-haired men. I hadn’t any clear impression of this guy except afterward I would recall rings on his fingers which would’ve caused me to glance up at his face with interest except at that instant something slammed into the back of my head be¬hind my ear knocking me forward, and down, like he’d thrown a hook at me from in front, I was on my face on the sun-heated vinyl upholstery of a car, or a van, and another blow or blows knocked me
out. Like anesthesia, it was. You’re out.
This was the forcible abduction. How it might be described by a witness who was there, who was also the victim. But who hadn’t any memory of what happened because it happened so fast, and she hadn’t been personally involved. I T’S L I K E THEY say. You are there, and not-there. He drove to this
place in the Sonoma Mountains, I would afterward learn, this cabin it would be called, and he raped me, and beat me, and shocked me with electrical cords and he stubbed cigarette butts on my stomach and breasts, and he said things to me like he knew me, he knew all my secrets, what a dirty-minded girl I was, what a nasty .girl, and selfish, like everyone of my privileged class as he called it. I’m. saying that these things were done to me but in fact they were done to my body mostly.
Like the cabin was in the Sonoma Mountains north of Healdsburg but
it was just anywhere for those eight days, and I was anywhere, I was holding onto being alive the way you would hold onto a straw you could breathe through, lying at the bottom of deep water. And that water opaque, you can’t see through to the surface.
He was gone, and he came back. He left me tied in the bed, it was a cot with a thin mattress, very dirty. There were only two windows in the cabin and there were blinds over them drawn tight. It was hot during what I guessed was the day. It was cool, and it was very quiet, at night. The lower parts of me were raw and throbbing with pain and other parts of me were in a haze of pain so I wasn’t able to think, and I wasn’t awake most of the time, not what you’d call actual wakefulness, with a personality.
What you call your personality, you know?-it’s not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It’s more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there’s no sign of it, like it had never been.
My eyes had been hurt, he’d mashed his fists into my eyes. The eyelids were puffy, I couldn’t see very well. It was like I didn’t try to see, I was saving my eyesight for when I was stronger. I had not seen the man’s face actually. I had felt him but I had not seen him, I could not have identified him. Any more than you could identify yourself if you had never seen yourself in a mirror or in any likeness.
In one of my dreams I was saying to my family I would not be see-ing ing them for a while, I was going away. I’m going away, I want to say .good-bye. Their faces were blurred. My sister, I was closer to than my :parents, she’s two years older than me and I adored her, my sister was crying, her face was blurred with tears She asked where was I was going and I said I didn’t know, but I wanted to say good-bye, and I wanted to say I love you, And this was so vivid it would seem to me to have hap¬pened actually, and was more real than other things that happened to me during that time I would learn afterward was eight days.
It might’ve been the same day repeated, or it might’ve been eighty days. It was a place, not a day. Like a dimension you could slip into, or be sucked into, by an undertow. And it’s there, but no one is aware of it. Until you’re in it, you don’t know; but when you’re in it, it’s all that you know. So you have no way of speaking. of it except like this. Stammering, and ignorant.
WHY H E B R o U G H T me food and water, why he decided to let me live, would never be clear. The others he’d killed after a few days. They went stale on him, you have to suppose. One of the bodies was
a buried in the woods a few hundred yards behind the cabin, others were dumped along Route ioi as far north as Crescent City. And possibly there were others never known, never located or identified. ; These facts, if they are facts, I would learn. later, as I would learn that the other girls and women had been older than me, the oldest was thirty, and the youngest he’d been on record as killing was eighteen. So it was speculated he had mercy on me because he hadn’t realized, abducting me in the parking lot, that I was so young, and in my battered condition in the cabin, when I started losing weight, I must’ve looked to him like a child. I was crying a lot, and calling Mommy! { Mom-my!
Like my own kids, grown, would call Mom-my! in some nightmare they were trapped in. But I never think of such things.
The man with the rings on his fingers, saying, There’s some reason ; I don’t know yet, that you have been spared. r
Later I would look back and think, there was a turn, a shifting of my fortune, when he first allowed me to wash. To wash! He could see I was ashamed, I was a naturally shy, clean girl. He allowed this. He might have assisted me, a little. He picked ticks out of my skin where they were invisible and gorged with blood. He hated ticks! They dis¬gusted him. He went away, and came back with food and Hires Diet Root Beer. We ate together sitting on the edge of the cot. And once when he allowed me out into the clearing at dusk. Like a picnic. His greasy fingers, and mine. Fried chicken, french fries, and runny cole slaw, my hands started shaking and my mouth was on fire. And my stomach convulsing with hunger, cramps that doubled me over like he’d sunk a knife into my guts and twisted. Still, I was able to eat some things, in little bites. I did not starve. Seeing the color come back into my face, he was impressed, stirred. He said in mild reproach, Hey: a butterfly could eat more’n you.
I would remember these little pale-yellow butterflies around the cabin. A swarm of them. And jays screaming, waiting to swoop down to snatch up food. I guess I was pretty sick. Delirious. My gums were infected. Four of my teeth were broken. Blood kept leaking to the back of my mouth making me sick, gagging. But I could walk to the car leaning against him, I was able to sit up normally in the passenger’s seat, buckled in, he always made sure to buckle me in, and a wire wound tight around my ankles. Driving then out of the forest, and the foothills I could not have identified as the Sonoma hills, and the sun high and gauzy in the sky, and I lost track of time, lapsing in and out of time but noticing that highway traffic was changing to suburban, more traffic lights, we were cruising through parking lots so vast you couldn’t see to the edge of them, sun-blinded spaces and rows of glittering cars like grave markers I saw them suddenly in a cemetery that went on forever.
He wanted me with him all the time now, he said. Keep an eye on you, girl. Maybe I was his trophy? The only female trophy in his abducting/raping/killing spree of an estimated seventeen months to be publicly displayed. Not beaten, strangled, raped to death, kicked to death, and buried like animal carrion. (This I would learn later.) Or maybe I was meant to signal to the world, if the world glanced through the windshield of his car, his daughter. A sign of-what? Hey, I’m normal. I’m a nice guy, see.
Except the daughter’s hair was wild and matted, her eyes were
bruised and one of them swollen almost shut. Her mouth was a slack puffy wound. Bruises on her face and throat and arms and her ribs were cracked, skinny body covered in pus-leaking burns and sores.
Yet he’d allowed me to wash, and he’d allowed me to wash out my :;clothes, I was less filthy now. He’d given me a T-shirt too big for me, :already soiled but I was grateful for it. Through acres of parking lots
we cruised like sharks seeking prey. I was aware of people glancing into the car, just by accident, seeing me, or maybe not seeing me, there were reflections in the windshield (weren’t there?) because of the sun, so maybe they didn’t see me, or didn’t see me clearly. Yet others, seeing me, looked away. It did not occur to me at the time that there must be a search for me, my face in the papers, on TV My face as it had been. At the time I’d stopped thinking of that other world. Mostly I’d stopped thinking. It was like anesthesia, you give in to it, there’s peace in it, almost. As cruising the parking lots with the man whistling to himself, humming, talking in a low affable monotone, I understood that he wasn’t thinking either, as a predator fish would not be thinking cruising beneath the surface of the ocean. The silent gliding of sharks,
that never cease their motion. I was concerned mostly with sitting
right: my head balanced on my neck, which isn’t easy to do, and the
wire wound tight around my ankles cutting off circulation. So my feet
were numb. I knew of gangrene, I knew of toes and entire feet going
black with rot. From my father I knew of tooth-rot, gum-rot. I was
trying not to think of those strangers who must’ve seen me, sure they
saw me, and turned away, uncertain what they’d seen but knowing it
was trouble, not wanting to know more.
Just a girl with a blackened eye, you figure she maybe deserved it.
H E S A I D, There must be some reason you are spared. He said, in my daddy’s voice from a long time ago, Know what, girl?-you’re not like the others. That’s why they wuld say he was insane, these were the acts of an insane person. And I would not disagree. Though I knew it was not so.
THE RED – H A I RED WOMAN in the khaki jacket and matching pants. Eventually she would have a name but it was not a name I would wish to know, none of them were. This was a woman, not a I girl. He’d put me in the backseat of his car now, so the passenger’s seat I was empty. He’d buckled me safely in. O.K., girl? You be good, now. ‘ We cruised the giant parking lot at dusk. When the lights first come on. (Where was this? Ukiah. Where I’d never been. Except for the red-haired woman I would have no memory of Ukiah.)
He’d removed his rings. He was wearing a white baseball cap.
There came this red-haired woman beside him smiling, talking like they were friends. I stared, I was astonished. They were coming toward the car. Never could I imagine what those two were talking about! I thought He will trade me for her and I was frightened. The man in the baseball cap wearing shiny dark glasses asking the red-haired woman-what? Directions? Yet he had the power to make her smile, there was a sexual ease between them. She was a mature woman with a shapely body, breasts I could envy and hips in the tight-fitting khaki pants that were stylish pants, with a drawstring waist. I felt a rush of anger for this woman, contempt, disgust, how stupid she was, unsus¬pecting, bending to peer at me where possibly she’d been told the man’s daughter was sitting, maybe he’d said his daughter had a question for her? needed an adult female’s advice? and in an instant she would find herself shoved forward onto the front seat of the car, down on her face, her chest, helpless, as fast as you might snap your fingers, too fast for her to cry out. So fast, you understand it had happened many times before. The girl in the backseat blinking and staring and unable to speak though she wasn’t gagged, no more able to scream for help than the woman struggling for her life a few inches away. She shuddered in sympathy, she moaned as the man pounded the woman with his fists. Furious, grunting! His eyes bulged. Were, there no witnesses? No one to see? Deftly he wrapped a blanket around the woman, who’d gone limp, wrapping it tight around her head and chest, he shoved her legs inside the car and shut the door and climbed into the driver’s seat and drove away humming, happy. In the backseat the girl was crying. If she’d had tears she would have cried.
Weird how your mind works: I was thinking I was that woman, in the front seat wrapped in the blanket, so the rest of it had not yet happened.
IT WAS THAT time, I think, I saw my mom. In the parking lot. rt There were shoppers, mostly women. And my mom was one of them. I knew it couldn’t be her, so far from home, I knew I was hundreds of miles from home, so it couldn’t be, but I saw her, Mom crossing in (front of the car, walking briskly to the entrance of Lord & Taylor.
He said, in my daddy’s voice from a long time ago, Know what, girl?-you’re not like the others. That’s why. THEY WOULD say he was insane, these were the acts of an insane person. And I would not disagree. Though I knew it was not so.
THE RED – H A I RED WOMAN in the khaki jacket and matching pants. Eventually she would have a name but it was not a name I would wish to know, none of them were. This was a woman, not a I girl. He’d put me in the backseat of his car now, so the passenger’s seat I was empty. He’d buckled me safely in. O.K., girl? You be good, now. ‘ We cruised the giant parking lot at dusk. When the lights first come on. (Where was this? Ukiah. Where I’d never been. Except for the red-haired woman I would have no memory of Ukiah.)
He’d removed his rings. He was wearing a white baseball cap.
There came this red-haired woman beside him smiling, talking like they were friends. I stared, I was astonished. They were coming toward the car. Never could I imagine what those two were talking about! I thought He will trade me for her and I was frightened. The man in the baseball cap wearing shiny dark glasses asking the red-haired woman-what? Directions? Yet he had the power to make her smile, there was a sexual ease between them. She was a mature woman with a shapely body, breasts I could envy and hips in the tight-fitting khaki pants that were stylish pants, with a drawstring waist. I felt a rush of anger for this woman, contempt, disgust, how stupid she was, unsuspecting, bending to peer at me where possibly she’d been told the man’s daughter was sitting, maybe he’d said his daughter had a question for her? needed an adult female’s advice? and in an instant she would find herself shoved forward onto the front seat of the car, down on her face, her chest, helpless, as fast as you might snap your fingers, too fast for her to cry out. So fast, you understand it had happened many times before. The girl in the backseat blinking and staring and unable to speak though she wasn’t gagged, no more able to scream for help than the woman struggling for her life a few inches away. She shuddered in sympathy, she moaned as the man pounded the woman with his fists. Furious, grunting! His eyes bulged. Were, there no witnesses? No one to see? Deftly he wrapped a blanket around the woman, who’d gone limp, wrapping it tight around her head and chest, he shoved her legs inside the car and shut the door and climbed into the driver’s seat and drove away humming, happy. In the backseat the girl was crying. If she’d had tears she would have cried.
Weird how your mind works: I was thinking I was that woman, in the front seat wrapped in the blanket, so the rest of it had not yet happened.
IT WAS THAT time, I think, I saw my mom. In the parking lot. rt There were shoppers, mostly women. And my mom was one of them. I knew it couldn’t be her, so far from home, I knew I was hundreds of miles from home, so it couldn’t be, but I saw her, Mom crossing in (front of the car, walking briskly to the entrance of Lord & Taylor. Yet I couldn’t wave to her, my arm was heavy as lead witness what he did to the red¬haired woman. I saw now that this was my importance to him: I would be a witness to his fury, his indignation, his disgust. Tying the woman’s wrists to the iron rails of the bed, spreading her legs and tying her ankles. Naked, the red-haired woman had no power. There was no sexual ease to her now, no confidence. You would not envy her now. You would scorn her now. You would not wish to be her now. She’d become a chicken on a spit.
I had to watch, I could not close my eyes or look away.
For it had happened already, it was completed. There was certitude
in this, and peace in certitude. When there is no escape, for what is
happening has already happened. Not once but many times.
When you give up struggle, there’s a kind of love.
The red-haired woman did not know this, in her terror. But I was
the witness, I knew.
They would ask me about him. I saw only parts of him. Like jigsaw puzzle parts. Like quick camera jumps and cuts, His back was pale and flaccid at the waist, more muscular at the shoulders. It was a broad pimply sweating back. It was a part of a man, like my dad, I would not see. Not in this way. Not straining, tensing. And the smell of a man’s hair, like congealed oil. His hair was stiff, dark, threaded with silver hairs like wires, at the crown of his head you could see the scalp be¬neath. On his torso and legs hairs grew in. dense waves and rivulets like water or grasses. He was grunting, he was making a high-pitched moaning sound. When he turned, I saw a fierce blurred face, I didn’t i recognize that face. And nipples. The nipples of a man’s breasts, wine- ; colored like berries. Between his thighs the angry thing swung like a length of rubber, slick and darkened with blood.
I would recall, yes, he had tattoos. Smudged-looking like ink blots.
Never did I see them clearly. Never did I see him clearly. I would not
have dared as you would not look into the sun in terror of being
blinded.
He kept us there together for three days. I mean, the red-haired) woman was there for three days, unconscious most of the time. There was a mercy in this. You learn to take note of small mercies and be grateful for them. Nor would he kill her in the cabin. When he was finished with her, disgusted with her, he half-carried her out to the car. I was alone, and frightened. But then he returned and said, O.K., girl, going for a ride. I was able to walk, just barely. I was very dizzy. I would ride in the backseat of the car like a big rag doll, boneless and unresisting.
He’d shoved the woman down beside him, hidden by a blanket wrapped around her head and upper body. She was not struggling now, her body was limp and unresisting for she too had weakened in the cabin, she’d lost weight. You learned to be weak to please him for you did not want to displease him in even the smallest things. Yet the woman managed to speak, this small choked begging voice. Don’t kill me, please. I won’t tell anybody. I won’t tell anybody don’t kill me. I have a little daughter, please don’t kill me. Please, God. Please.
I wasn’t sure if this voice was (somehow) a made-up voice. A voice of my imagination. Or like on TV Or my own voice, if I’d been older and had a daughter. Please don’t kill me. Please, God.
For always it’s this voice when you’re alone and silent you hear it.
AFTERWARD THEY WOULD speculate he’d panicked. Seeing TV
spot announcements, the photographs of his “victims:’ When last seen ” and where, Menlo Park, Ukiah. There were witnesses’ descriptions of
the abductor and a police sketch of his face, coarser and uglier and older
than his face which was now disguised by dark glasses. In the drawing
he was clean-shaven but now his jaws were covered in several days’
beard, a stubbly beard, his hair was tied in a ponytail and the baseball cap pulled low on his head. Yet you could recognize him in the drawing, that looked as if it had been executed by a blind man. So he’d panicked.
The first car he’d been driving he abandoned somewhere, he was driving another, a stolen car with switched license plates. You came to fee that his life was such maneuvers. He was tireless in invention as a willful child and would seem to have had no purpose beyond this and so, when afterward I would learn details of his background, his family life in San Jose, his early incarcerations as a juvenile, as a youth, as an adult “offender” now on parole from Bakersfield maximum-security prison, I would block off such information as not related to me, not related to the man who’d existed exclusively for me as, for a brief time.
while, though lacking a name, for he’d never asked me my name, I’d existed exclusively for him. I was contemptuous of “facts” for I came to know that no accumulation of facts constitutes knowledge, and no impersonal knowledge constitutes the intimacy of knowing.
Know what, girl? You’re not like the others. You’re special. That’s the reason. DRIVING FAST, FARTHER into the foothills. The road was ever narrower and bumpier. There were few vehicles on the road, all of them minivans or campers. He never spoke to the red-haired woman moaning and whimpering beside him but to me in the backseat, looking at me through the rear view mirror, the way my dad used to do when I rode in the backseat, and Mom was up front with him. He said, How ya doin, girl?
O.K.
Doin O.K., huh?
Yes.
I’m gonna let you go, girl, you know that, huh? Gonna give you your freedom.
To this I could not reply. My swollen lips moved in a kind of smile as you smile out of politeness.
Less you want to trade? With her?
Again I could not reply. I wasn’t certain what the question was. My smile ached in my face but it was a sincere smile.
He parked the car on an unpaved lane off the road. He waited, no vehicles were approaching. There were no aircraft overhead. It was very quiet except for birds. He said, C’mon, help me, girl. So I moved my legs that were stiff, my legs that felt strange and skinny to me, I climbed out of the car and fought off dizziness helping him with the bound woman, he’d pulled the blanket off her, her discolored swollen face, her face that wasn’t attractive now, scabby mouth and panicked eyes, brown eyes they were, I would remember those eyes pleading. For they were my own, but in. one who was doomed as I was not. He said then, so strangely: Stay here, girl. Watch the car. Somebody shows
up, honk the horn. Two-three times. Got it?
I whispered yes. I was staring at the crumbly earth. I could not look at the woman now. I would not watch them move away into the woods.
Maybe it was a test, he’d left the key in the ignition. It was to make me think I could drive the car away from there, I could drive to get help, or I could run out onto the road and get help. Maybe I could get help. He had a gun, and he had knives, but I could have driven away. But the sun was beating on my head, I couldn’t move. My legs were heavy like lead. My eye was swollen shut and throbbing. I believed it was a test but I wasn’t certain. Afterward they would ask if I’d had any chance to escape in those days he kept me captive and always I said no, no I did not have a chance to escape. Because that was so. That was how it was to me, that I could not explain. Yet I remember the keys in the ignition, and I remember that the road was close by. He would strangle the woman, that was his way of killing and this I seemed to know, It would require some minutes. It was not an easy way of killing. I could run, I could run along the road and hope that someone would come along, or I could hide, and he wouldn’t find me in all that wilderness, if he called me I would not an¬swer. But I stood there beside the car because I could not do these things. He trusted me, and I could not betray that trust. Even if he would kill me, I could not betray him.
Yes, I heard her screams in the woods. I think I heard. It might have been jays. It might have been my own screams I heard. But I heard them.
A FEW D AY S later he would be dead. He would be shot down by police in a motel parking lot in Petaluma. Why he was there, in that place, about fifty miles from the cabin, I don’t know. He’d left me in the cabin chained to the bed. It was filthy, flies and ants. The chain was long enough for me to use the toilet. But the toilet was backed up. Blinds were drawn on the windows. I did not dare to take them down or break the windowpanes but I looked out, I saw just the clearing, a haze of green. Overhead there were small planes sometimes. A helicopter. I wanted to think that somebody would rescue me but I knew better, I knew nobody would find me. But they did find me.
2. Compare/Contrast the SUPPRESSION THEME of “Stones of the Village” and “Sweat.” What was similar or different about the life of each main character and their ultimate outcome?
How can isolation be seen as a contributing factor in each character’s life and actions?
READINGS:
***STONE OF THE VILLAGE
Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935) was born in New Orleans with a Creole background (a mix of black, white and native Americans). She attended a two-year teachers’ training program which enabled her to being her long career as a writer, teacher and social activist. She married the African American poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and moved to New York City and Washington, D.C. where she served on the board of the National Association of Colored Women, the first of many such positions.
When her marriage failed, she moved to Delaware eventually becoming the head of the Howard High School where she taught for 18 years. She then met and married Robert John Nelson, publisher of a weekly newspaper dedicated to the cause of black rights and continued her activism for the rest of her life. In 1899, she wrote the first collection of short fiction published by an African-American woman. Her poetry and short stories clearly reflect her Creole background and focus on racial problems. Her poignant story, “The Stones of the Village” shows both literary skill and strong thematic content. I found the story incredibly sad.
*** HURSTON, SWEAT
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was born in Eatonville, Florida, the lst incorporated all-black town in the U.S. She wrote a famous essay where she states she never knew she was “colored” until she was 13. After her mother died, her father remarried and she decided to leave home. By supporting herself, she eventually attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. and later Barnard College, part of Columbia University. She was the only Black woman enrolled and studied anthropology under the famous Frank Boas, receiving her degree in 1928. She later enrolled in the graduate school, all the time publishing stories that focused on her small town background.
This accomplished, intelligent woman got into disputes with other writers of the Harlem Renaissance who disliked her use of dialect and story selections. Eventually, her stories were no longer printed. She worked as a maid in her later years, suffered a stroke and died penniless in a welfare home. She was buried in an unmarked grave. Now, her stories and autobiography are rediscovered and well known.
In “Sweat,” we see a carefully crafted story framed literally around the door frame of Delia Jones house.
3. In Dunbar-Nelson’s “Stones” we read of racism and discrimination Did Victor’s grandmother make things worse for Victor by sending him away? Explain what she was likely foreseeing if he stayed based on her own life.
Did Victor have triumph over abusers? Why was he so hard on Black people in his court? What would be the effect on his wife and son if his heritage were to be known?
How does the story have multiple levels of tragedy? Charles Chestnutt was an African American who looked white. He spent his life as a writer pointing out the various terrible effects of discrimination based on color. How would he feel about this story.
4.. Many of you chose to write your second paper on the memoir, the Glass Castle. Discuss the presentation of poor parenting and dysfunctional family life in terms of “reality” that most people experience.
For the vast majority of readers, this is not their “reality.” If that is true, how can this qualify, if it does, as literature? In other words, is this a “fit” selection for a course in Women in Literature? Discuss
READINGS:
THE GLASS CASTLE
by Jeanette Walls
Internet
5.5. Sometimes people say that literature has no significance since it is often about fictional events and people. Choose 2 works FROM THE ENTIRE SEMESTER which cause you to doubt the accuracy of this statement, especially that writing has no value.
Has reading about women in literature had an impact? In other words, defend your 2 choices in terms of their significance or impact on you (I’m assuming you can find at least two). Give examples-don’t be too general.
THE READINGS FROM THE ENTIRE SEMESTER:
1. Frankenstein- Mary Wollstonecraft
2. Little Women- Louisa May Alcott
3. The Awakening- Kate Chopin
4. Life in the Iron Mills- Rebecca Harding Davis
5. A New England Nun- Mary Wilkins Freeman
6. Angel of the Grave- Edith Wharton
7. A Girl with Blackened Eye- Joyce Carol Oates
8. Jury of her Peers- Susan Glaspell
9. Stones of the Village- Alice Dunbar Nelson
10. Sweat- Zora Neale Hurston
11. Glass Castle- Jeanette Walls