Tag: Novel

Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Doubleday, 1957.

Summary of Work
Richard Chase seeks to discuss the development of the American novel as it diverged from the English novel. He states that it is very important to make a distinction between the two traditions, as the English novel seeks to derive social order out of the disparate elements or plot points in the novel and is largely a novel of manners that adheres to social expectations and the unities, whereas the American novel is much more focused on exploring the possibilities and realities of specific, narrow situations and much less interested in wresting order out of the chaos of those events. The American novel, Chase says, has therefore regularly not been a novel as the term has been generally defined, but instead a romance. He states that the novel is a work which focuses mainly on character and the development of that character, whereas the romance focuses mainly on action or plot and has very little character development. The narrators of the novel are more often omniscient and able to display a proper scenery and social sphere that the character develops within, but the romance utilizes a very narrow section of society simply as a backdrop, and the personal motivations and thoughts of the characters take center stage as they go through the plot. This view of the novel is largely the viewpoint of Henry James, the American novelist whom Chase finds to be the greatest American novelist in the history of the American novel. He also gives a brief commentary on melodrama, which is the height of extremes and dualities, saying that the American novel often indulges in such language in order to further plot or explore extreme or peculiar situations.

Of Hawthorne and his work, particularly The Scarlet Letter, Chase says that it is firmly in the category of romance and not the novel, particularly because of the lack of scenery except as backdrop to the main characters in the novel; furthermore, he finds that there is no character development, but rather the characters serve largely as psychological forms and allegory, and they do not change their natures throughout the work. Like James, Chase finds these facts to be somewhat the faults of the novel, although the creation of a psychological novel is, Chase admits, an important and quality development for the American novel. He compares symbol and allegory at this point, stating that allegory functions in its purest form when the readers know what each particular part of the story represents so that they can always refer back to that representation, which is never changing: this is Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. On the other hand, symbols are a fusion of many meanings, and those meanings change throughout the course of the novel; therefore, the A on Hester Prynne’s chest could be seen as a symbol, but more importantly, the whale in Melville’s Moby Dick is a symbol.

Of Melville’s masterwork Moby Dick, Chase states that while it starts out with high promises of realism to be a novel, it falls into the category of romance, not a novel, and despite its certainly masterful pieces within the whole work, there are many parts that are poorly flung together to fit the emotional fits that befit Ahab and the romance tale of his obsession. Yet in Moby Dick lies a central tenet of American literature: a life of contradictions through experience and a life of ironic perception. These features appear throughout the development of the American novel, and Melville’s work is a perfect example of that. He also terms Moby Dick an epic romance, more akin to the poetry of Homer than the structure of the prose novel because of the melodrama and otherworldly elements it contains.

Chase attributes the development of regionalized language and straightforward diction to the novels of Mark Twain, particularly that of Huckleberry Finn. He states that the colloquial language of the novel forever changed the way American writers approached their characters, swaying from the formal English language and into the representation of the spoken language. Yet even here, Chase asserts that the novel is more of a tragi-comic romance than it is a novel, given the focus on the action and the interior narrative of Huck than on the social atmosphere around him and the unifying of social issues.

Next he discusses novels of manners, which deal with how to navigate social class and fix problematic characters or behaviors, or, if they cannot be fixed, to cast them out. He claims that Jane Austen, while not the most masterful writer, is the master of the purest form of the novel of manners. American novelists, by comparison, Chase finds sorely lacking in ability. He claims that F. Scott Fitzgerald is a second, possibly third rate author who nevertheless he will discuss because he is one of the only people who have successfully attempted a novel of manners in the US. He discusses The Great Gatsby in this sense, calling attention to the discussion of scene and character and the reverse development of Gatsby from an experienced rags to riches man back to a child with idyllic imaginations, while all around him he struggles to integrate into a rich society that has a set of rules he cannot meet or follow, which in combination with his imaginings, leads to his death. Despite the success as a novel of manners, Chase finds Fitzgerald’s style lacking, and he is stymied by the fact that Henry James thought that Fitzgerald did the most for the American novel since Mark Twain.

Finally, Chase discusses three novels by William Faulkner, who he considers to be the second or third best American novelist, second only to James and perhaps third depending on how one compares Mark Twain to Faulkner. The majority of this final chapter is dedicated to The Sound and the Fury, discussing how Faulkner managed to (mostly) successfully provide unique language styles to each of his characters as they tell their part of the story while at the same time offering solid character development over plot, where the plot happens because of character development. Chase finds no language more masterful than Faulkner’s when he knows what his character sounds like, and he also demonstrates the best of American prose with his crafting of Benjy’s narrative through the eyes of an idiot. It shows obsessions, character development, tragedy, and most importantly to befit James’s and Chase’s definition of the novel, provides a creation of order and unity through Dilsey, who is the only character capable of keeping the Compson family from falling apart at the end of its 200-year stint in the South. Furthermore, Chase claims that the only reason that this novel is the greatest novel written up to the point of his writing is because there have been novelists who came before to establish certain mechanical elements or traditions, and that finally there is enough American history available to create a proper background and scenery for character development to take center stage in the American novel. Chase finds the work a transcendence of romance to create an amalgamation of realism, romance, and the qualities of the novel that James laid down.

Discussion of Work
Chase’s book provides important information about how the American novel is viewed in comparison with the English novel; his introduction, which defines specific differences between English and American, novels is useful because it provides a framework from which to view American novels and their development over a century of writing. However, Chase falls prey to worshipping Henry James, finding no issues with him or his writing, seemingly unquestioning of the structure as pure and perfect in form for all to follow. In doing so, he excludes many masterworks from the title of “novel,” instead relegating them to what is implicitly considered and insinuated a lesser form.

His treatment of Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and especially Fitzgerald are full of backhanded compliments or appraisals: it fits perfectly the, “well, they did this or that, but they still will never measure up to James” form that he establishes from the beginning of the novel. The blind spot essentially disables him from seeing, even as he describes the incredible feats of Faulkner, how Faulkner will come to transcend James in their importance of the development of the novel in the twentieth century. It also disables him from understanding how the language of Fitzgerald would come to be recognized as some of the most carefully and well-crafted language and writing of the Jazz Age.

Another failing of this work is that it completely ignores and excludes authors of color. He does mention that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man exists in passing, but only to state that the tradition he is speaking of has influenced it. He doesn’t even mention anything about the work. Certainly, the development of the American novel was heavily influenced by the writing that came out of the traditions of African American communities, let alone other communities of color. Faulkner would be as much influenced by the stories and cultural traditions of communities of color as he was by Mark Twain, as is evident in his portrayal of the character Dilsey in his work and his intricate discussions of the race issues inherent in the Southern mind. Perhaps these things are overlooked because throughout his work, Chase is insistent that morals and moral teachings and lessons are not meant to be read in the American novel: the American novel is simply an exploration of history and moral lessons that the characters deal with in all their contradictory experiences.

by bluesyjune

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Doubleday, 2016.

Summary of Work
Cora is a slave girl on the Randall plantation in Georgia. Her mother, Mabel, ran away and was never found, and she had been left alone as a young girl. Her grandmother, Ajarry, had a plot of land that she used to garden and had passed on to Mabel. Cora determined she should keep that space as well, and when a man tried to put a doghouse on it, she tore it down with a hatchet. She was considered pariah there from then on, and placed in the Hob, the lodging cabin for the women who were considered odd or wrong in some way.

On a celebration for a slave man’s birthday, a slave named Caesar approaches her and asks if she will make a run North with him. At first she thinks he’s crazy or trying to trick her, but after being beaten for protecting a slave boy from the plantation owner’s drunken brother Terrance and then learning that her master is dead and Terrance has taken over running the plantation, she agrees to go with Caesar. As they try to leave, Lovey, a young slave girl, runs after them and insists on going. They make it through the swamp and are in the woods when they are ambushed by slave catchers. Lovey is caught, but Cora and Caesar escape, critically injuring a young boy of 12. When they get to town where there is a station master for the Underground Railroad, they learn that the boy they hurt is likely to die, and there is a mob looking for them.

They escape to South Carolina, where they are given new names and life stories, and Cora, now Bessie, first works for a family and watches the children, and then is hired to work as an actor in the museum for American History. She acts out African life, then the passage on a slave ship, and finally plantation life. She feels awkward and ashamed over it, but learns that she has the power of staring and forcing white people to realize that she can look at them just as they can look at her, but perhaps her gaze has more power. Caesar works at a factory, and they get to where they are comfortable with life and decide to stay, even though there are many trains that would take them farther north. Cora enjoys learning to read and having her own money and a bed to sleep in as well as a black community to enjoy. However, soon after making that decision, Sam, the barkeep who is also the station master, warns them that they shouldn’t get too comfortable: there is talk of forced sterilization of black people. Cora knows this, having gone to the doctor previously and felt like she was going to be forced to choose their “birth control” method.

Not long after Sam’s warning, Cora overhears that there is a slave catcher named Ridgeway searching for a pair of runaways who murdered a boy. This scares her, as she knows who Ridgeway is: he’s a famous slave catcher who wasn’t able to catch her mother, and he has a vendetta against her because of it. She runs to Sam, who is at the bar, and he tells her to go hide in the house at the platform, and he’ll try to get to Caesar. However, before Sam gets home, the slave catchers get there first and burn his house down, leaving Cora trapped. She doesn’t know how long she starves for before there is a small train coming down the line. It passes without stopping and she runs after it until it stops. It is a maintenance train, and she learns that the Georgia line is shut down and that the trains to this station have been cancelled, so he cannot help her more than drop her off at the next station, which is in North Carolina.

That station is technically closed as well, and black people are being hunted and lynched and placed on the “freedom trail” to rot in the trees for miles and miles. The station master hides her in his home for months because there is no way to get her out. She witnesses a lynching and it sickens her, and every week there is a town picnic with this ritual. Watchers regularly check houses, but she is well hidden in the attic. She spends time reading and gets better at it, and although she has read the Bible, she prefers almanacs. Then, one day, she accidentally tips over her chamber pot and she worries that the housekeeper, who is not one of the abolitionists, might have heard her. Nothing happens. Then she gets sick, and the man’s wife brings her down into a bedroom to help her get better and they send the housekeeper away, claiming that the husband has a disease that’s very communicable and they can’t have her getting it or being in the house, doctor’s orders.

That Friday when the picnic comes, the wife of the station master tells her that she can stay in the room and rest as long as she stays away from the window. She is grateful until their home is unexpectedly raided by watchers and she is discovered hiding under the bed. Ridgeway has led them. The station master and his wife are tied to the tree and presumably burned to death, and she is plunged into bondage again. They are going to Missouri to catch another slave before they head back to Georgia: Ridgeway hadn’t expected to find her but had just wanted to capture whoever was there with the Underground Railroad. He talks to her, and when they get another slave man, Jasper, they are constantly hitting him because he won’t stop singing. Ridgeway ends up shooting him and splattering Cora with his blood.

They stop in Tennessee, which has been largely destroyed by yellow fever and fires, and Ridgeway and his black freeman, Homer, make her put on a new dress and go to dinner with Ridgeway. A black man sees her in chains and in the nice dress and shoes and won’t stop staring. After they eat and she uses the outhouse, they go back and travel again, because their other companion refuses to stay where he thinks there is yellow fever. That night, the man grabs Cora out of the cart and cage in order to have sex with her, but Ridgeway is on to him and stops him. During the fight she considers running, but doesn’t. Then, three black men show up with guns and a fight ensues to set her free. Homer escapes, the other man dies, and Ridgeway is badly beaten and chained in the forest.

She escapes again on the Underground Railroad to Indiana, where she works on the Valentine plantation: Valentine is a biracial man who looks white and was able to inherit land from his father, which he sold and then moved further West to buy another plantation where he could harbor fugitive slaves and work with the Underground Railroad to ferry people further north if they desired. Cora stays there, asking people if they have seen her mother. No one has, and Cora goes on hating her mother for leaving her. She also feels guilty about all the people who have died for her: station masters, the 12-year-old boy, Lovey, Caesar, and possibly Sam. Meanwhile, she learns how to read and write much better than she had, and she lives a very free life in comparison to what she had done previously. Sam shows up one day, and she is thrilled to learn that he is alive. He is going to head West after one last job for the Underground Railroad. She falls in love with Royal, one of the men who saves her. One evening, he takes her to an old house and they go into the cellar; he shows her the old station there that is no longer in use. He doesn’t even know where it leads. He wants to show her because she has been on the railroad so much and had such a complicated journey. Royal is always helping with the Underground Railroad, and he brings her almanacs when he can. His last gift to her is the next year’s almanac. She lets him kiss her and she tells him about her life, apologizing when she gets to the part where she was gang raped. He tells her she shouldn’t be sorry for anything, but that those men who have done these things to her should.

One evening during a plantation debate meeting (they are regularly held with special guests and feasts), there is a raid. The white townspeople, who have built around the plantation, hate that there are prosperous black people next to them, and they hate them more because they know that there are fugitive slaves there. The white people combined with many slave catchers start shooting into the church and first kill the speaker whom they hate, and next Royal when he goes to aid him. Cora holds Royal in her hands as he dies, and he tells her to run to the station he showed her and live free. One of the Valentine sons tears her from Royal’s dead body to get her out of the gunfire, and when she gets out, Ridgeway and Homer catch her. Homer was dressed like a plantation worker, and had been in the meeting. She fights them but is put in chains again, and Ridgeway forces her to tell him where the Underground Railroad station is. She shows him, ashamed that she is revealing the secret to a slave catcher. Thinking of Royal’s trust in her, she grabs onto Ridgeway and shoves them both down the stairs, to the dismay of Homer. The fall breaks Ridgeway’s femur bone and has it sticking out of the leg, and his head also cracks his head open. Cora also is injured, but nowhere near as badly. Homer goes to Ridgeway and forgets about Cora as Ridgeway asks Homer to write down some things.

Cora gets the cart going and rides away down the line until she can go no further and has to sleep. In the morning she is too sore to maneuver the cart and so walks the rest of the way. She comes out in the woods, but she isn’t sure where she is. She cleans herself in the river and takes some water, and then sits by a road. There, three carts pass her, and a black man is in the last one. He offers to take her with him to the West, and she accepts.

This novel also has vignettes throughout it that tell about the lives of individual characters, including Mabel. Mabel made it through the swamp before she felt guilty about leaving her daughter. She knew she could make it back before the alarm sounded, and she determined to head back, happy with her little taste of freedom. But on the way back she gets bitten by a poisonous snake and dies on a patch of moss in the swamp.

Discussion of Work
This novel is a form of abolitionist narrative: a commentary on slavery and on white supremacy, but also a commentary on the courageous and honorable acts of a few white people and what good that it does. Cora, the main character, spends a lot of time wondering why white people who have good and prosperous lives would risk everything for her and other black slaves: everyone she asks tells her that she should know.

Whitehead also refuses to eliminate historically accurate language from his novel, using racial slurs and other oppressive and racist epithets in his work as dialogue: the linguistic choices may seem unnecessary to some, but it adds an important layer of authenticity to the work to display the horrors of the slave trade and plantation life as well as the extreme dangers and fears that came with being a fugitive slave. It allows for a more historically accurate novel, as this may be said to be historical fiction as well as abolitionist.

Whitehead experiments with nonlinear narrative as well, putting in biographical narratives to break up the main narrative. He often does this at times when the tension is high: when Cora has just been caught or when there is rising tension about her safety. The discussions of the white plantation owner Terrance Randall is particularly jolting, because it includes detailed descriptions of how he had slaves tortured and killed for running away. These details do not come altogether directly with the biographical narrative of the Randalls, but come as a combination of the biographical narrative and the main narrative of the story. While at first the choice to break up the narrative in this way may be frustrating for readers, what it highlights is that no matter who’s story is being told, the horrors of slavery were the same everywhere, and affected everyone it touched, white or black person.

One particularly important scene is where Cora learns the power of her gaze. It is reminiscent of bell hooks’ discussion of the black gaze on the white subject; she states that it is unnerving for white people because they never think of black people as agents that can look upon them, but objects to be looked upon. When they discover that black people can look at them, it upsets their supremacist attitudes because they are forced to realize that even enslaved or without full rights, they are capable of being active agents and of asserting their power for either agency or freedom, or both. This also happens regularly throughout the novel with dance. The slaves put on a specific dancing show for the masters, which is almost mocking in its attitudes, in order to please their owners. But when the masters are away, their dancing completely changes in its form and tone, becoming a way to express their freedom to move their bodies in some small way and to engage with their community. The black dancing body has the same power, then, that the black gaze has, but with a slight difference: white people aren’t always aware of the parody or mocking going on with the dancing, meaning that it gives a momentary power reversal where they have power over their masters, mocking them and judging them and asserting freedom and agency without ever being reprimanded or punished for it.

by bluesyjune

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

Erdrich, Louise. Future Home of the Living God. HarperCollins, 2017.

Summary of Work
Cedar is insistent that she is going to go meet her birth mother on the reservation for the Ojibwe people, but her adoptive mother and father, Sarah and Glen, are worried about her going. There is social unrest, and it may collapse the nation. Still, she insists on going, and she meets her family and tells them that she’s four months pregnant. She met a man at her Church and they unexpectedly fell in love and slept with each other in the basement of the church after a performance of the nativity. Everyone is happy for her, but also worried.

Evolution has started running backwards, and there are rumors that pregnant women have children who are primitive versions of humans. Soon, the government mandates through a new addition to the Patriot Act that all women are to turn themselves in and if they do so voluntarily, they will be given the best rooms and care in the hospitals. Cedar locks herself in her house with provisions and tradable goods, mainly cigarettes and booze, and does not leave the house. She notices that all of a sudden, there are no brown skinned people in the news or on TV anymore, and she wonders if there are any left outside either. Her partner, Mike, keeps calling but she won’t answer, so he comes over and pounds on the door until she lets him in. They talk, and he tells her that he wants to stay with her and protect her because the government is now offering rewards for turning in pregnant women. Cedar goes nearly insane being forced to stay inside, and she convinces Mike to let her go with him to get Subway sandwiches. While she is sitting in the car, she watches the cops take a pregnant woman off the street and beat her husband while their daughter looks on and bystanders hide her. It traumatizes Cedar, and she stays inside. She accidentally lets herself be seen by the mailman Hero, but he hides her and tells her to stay inside because the government officials will catch her.

By this time the US proper has dissolved and all governments are regionally run; all street signs are renamed biblical verses. Mike forges marriage papers for them so he can register their home. Meanwhile, a mysterious woman who calls herself Mother keeps popping up on Cedar’s computer screen, even after they unplug the internet, bury their cell phones, and break the computer. One day, Mike leaves, and a woman forcibly enters the home and steals Cedar away. She is forced into a hospital, where they drug her. When her roommate Agnes tells her to stop taking her “vitamins,” she comes to and realizes how terrible her condition is. She watches Agnes try to break out and fail, and then she is whisked away to an operating room to have her child, and no one will tell Cedar what happened. She gets a new Asian roommate, who never speaks and spends her time unraveling blankets to create yarn and then a rope so they can escape out the window. Cedar helps her do this, and in the process, she learns from her mother Sarah, who is undercover trying to save pregnant women, that Mike is the one who turned her in after he was captured and tortured. Sarah helps them escape, but not before they have to murder a nurse to save themselves. Tia, the Asian roommate, has her baby in a cave, but it is stillborn. When they emerge from the cave, Tia insists that she go back with her husband because she is no longer pregnant and not a target, and Sarah takes Cedar to the reservation, where Eddie, Cedar’s stepfather, is now government head.

She is happy there, despite her confinement, and she feels safe. Sarah is upset over her daughter’s pregnancy, and also reveals that Glen is actually her biological father; it was one of his short-livid dalliances. Eddie gets Cedar forged tribal papers and gives her back her birth name: Mary Potts. Then, one night when she is sleeping on her half-sister’s floor, she hears someone come in. She hides in the mess of clothes on the floor, and is hidden so well that when the woman, who sounds just like the woman from the computer screen, comes in the room search for her, she cannot find her. Soon after that, things spiral downward. She has been going out now and again with tribal family members because Eddie has guaranteed that the government is not taking the tribal women because they are protected. In fact, Eddie has been reclaiming original tribal lands with success. But one night Mike comes and gets her and asks her to go with him. He explains that she is highly valued because she is carrying one of the originals, an untainted genetic child, and if she goes with him they can start their own following and government. She says he is crazy, and he leaves without her. Then, when she and her biological mother are praying at the statue of a saint, Cedar is again kidnapped, this time by poor travelers who are in need of money and want to turn her in for the reward.

Cedar is placed in a prison facility in Stillwater, which serves as an insemination facility. She learns that women are being picked up for minor or imagined infractions if they are of childbearing age and being forcibly inseminated. They are all required to have their pictures taken, and Cedar comes to learn that is because when they die, which they all do from pregnancy complications caused by the reverse evolution, their pictures are put up on a wall in the commons area. During one of her appointments she meets a woman who had helped her to escape the first time, but she realizes that this time there will be no escape. Instead, she asks Jesse to look after her baby, which she promises to do. Cedar gives birth successfully, but she barely gets to see her child, and her heart is damaged from the delivery and she barely survives. When she recovers, she is not released from the facility, as was originally promised, but forcibly inseminated. The story ends with her still writing her story to her child, who she hopes will someday read her story.

Discussion of Work
While largely considered a failure of a novel for Louise Erdrich, the novel does pose some intriguing questions about female reproductive rights. A dystopic science fiction novel, the narrative explores the personhood of women at a time when the species is endangered. Women become objects rather than people, first promised some sort of decent care for turning themselves in if pregnant, and then having the tables turned on them as the situation worsens. One of the important points which is subtly noted throughout the novel is that the majority of the women who are taken are people of color: white people are largely exempt from the government mandates, although white people who find a problem with the forcible detainment and insemination of women are eliminated or forced into the system.

While it is not fully pursued, the issue of dual identity is broached. It is only when Cedar decides that she wants to embrace her full identity that, that identity is stripped from her, as she is stripped of the chance to learn more than she does. The novel is an experiment with female identity: is it motherhood, fertility, sex, or something altogether different? This is also a set of questions asked about the children these women are forced to have: what will their status be? Will they be treated similarly to how we treat endangered animal species? Global warming and how humans change nature is another subtle theme, with a discussion of how the situation came to be. The change started when there was no more winter and the glaciers were gone, the continental ice and permafrost releasing bacteria or some sort of toxin into the air which causes the reverse evolution.

This is also a discussion of how the world ends, which, as Cedar keeps being surprised over, is not very chaotic. People keep going about their daily lives and adapting to the biological changes to their food and the environment around them. Essentially, the world does not go out violently, but quietly, with only one specific group of people, women of childbearing age, affected by the reproduction issue.

by bluesyjune

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. Ecco, 2005.

Summary of Work
For the purposes of time for studying for my comprehensive exams, I have elected to only read the first part of Don Quixote for my studies. What follows is a summary of the first part.

Cervantes begins his novel by having a conversation with a friend who tells Cervantes that he should write the tale (completely true!) of Don Quixote as he will, and then add all the proper embellishments in later, since that seems the easiest way to get things started. Cervantes agrees and begins the tale, urging readers to simply enjoy what he’s written in its simple format.

Don Quixote started out as an eccentric minor nobleman in the village of La Mancha. He had a great estate, but he did not care for it and kept selling pieces of it off in order to buy more books about chivalry and knights errant, since he loved to read the tales in them. By his late middle age, he decides he will become a knight-errant like the men he read about in his books, and he prepares armor and his horse, an old nag who he names Rocinante, and gives himself the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He also decides he needs a lady to perform the deeds for, so he renames a farm girl he cares for Dulcinea del Toboso to dedicate his deeds to.

He sets off and stops at an inn for the evening, and believes that the inn is a castle and the innkeeper a king who has been enchanted to look like an innkeeper. He also mistakes prostitutes for princesses, and he recites poetry to them. He struggles and is unable to remove his helmet he has made for himself, so he eats dinner through the opening in the helmet, all the while believing he is being entertained in a castle. While he is there, he realizes he has not been knighted, and so he asks the innkeeper to knight him. The innkeeper talks to him about it and when he asks for payment, he discovers Don Quixote has no money, and so the innkeeper tells him he must carry money. Don Quixote said that the knights of old never carried any and were always provided for, and so he saw no need to carry money, which is why he had none on him.

That night he keeps vigil in the stables because he believes that will allow him to be knighted in the morning. While he is speaking of Dulcinea and keeping watch, more guests arrive. In trying to get water for their animals, they move Don Quixote’s armor, and it infuriates him so that he kills one of the guests and knocks another unconscious. Mortified, the innkeeper quickly performs a bizarre knighting ceremony and sends him on his way. Don Quixote determines to go home to get more clothing and some money, and he encounters a master whipping his young servant. He stops the farmer and asks what is going on, and the farmer boy says that he is being whipped because he complained about not getting the wages promised him. Don Quixote tells the farmer to pay him and makes him swear he will by the name of knighthood, and Don Quixote continues on, disregarding the farm boy’s plea to go back to the house with them to ensure that he was paid before he left. When Don Quixote leaves, the farmer goes back to whipping the boy even harder than he had previously been doing.

Later on the journey, Don Quixote meets a group of merchants, and he tries to order them to claim that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman alive. When they ask for a picture so they can see her before they say she is the most beautiful, they insult him and he starts to attack, but Rocinante stumbles and the merchants beat him. He is left lying in the road. A laborer from his village finds him and carries him on his mule back to La Mancha, Rocinante in tow. Don Quixote is busy discussing how his trials are like those of knights of old, and the villager realizes that he is insane. He takes Don Quixote back to his own house, where the barber and priest are visiting at the behest of family members who are worried that the books in the home have driven Don Quixote to madness.

The priest and barber work together to go through Quixote’s books and burn the ones on chivalry that they find inappropriate. His niece wants them to burn all the books there. Still, the priest goes through the titles, saving some because of rarity or virtue, and wants to keep the poetry, but the niece persuades them not to because then her uncle may become a poet, which would be even worse than he is now. He also finds a novel by Cervantes, which he keeps in hopes that there will be a sequel to the novel.

Don Quixote wakes, delusional, and wants to get to the library, but he finds it walled off. He believes an enchanter has done it to keep him from his books and has carried off the books on a dragon, as per what his niece told him. Quixote believes the enchanter to be his nemesis, and believes he will defeat him. he determines to sally forth again, this time with a squire, Sancho Panza.

They first come to a field of windmills, which Quixote believes are giants, and he charges them, injuring himself as he finds that they “become windmills” as he goes to attack because the enchanter changed them to windmills. He finds a replacement for his lance by breaking off a tree limb, and when Sancho complains about hunger, Quixote explains that often they may go without food and have to weather the elements, and that knights do not complain about these things. A few days later, they encounter monks taking a lady and attendants on a journey, and Quixote insists that the lady is a damsel in distress, and he attacks the monks, knocking one down. Sancho tries to steal that monk’s clothing as spoils of war, but is soundly beaten for it. The monks ride off, and Quixote tells the ladies they must go to Toboso to tell Dulcinea of his grand deed. One of her attendants gets angry at him, and they do battle, but mid-battle the narrative cuts off due to a supposed end in the manuscript at hand.

Next Cervantes describes the process of finding the rest of the tale, finding the tale written on Arabic parchment. He hires a Moor to read and translate the stories, and the narrative continues.

The attendant cuts Quixote’s ear, and he knocks the man down in return, threatening to kill him. He spares him only because the ladies promise they all will present themselves to Dulcinea. After the battle, Sancho asks his master for an island to be governor of, believing he has earned it. He also worries that they might go to jail for what they have done, but Don Quixote ensures him that knights-errant and their squires never go to jail.

That evening, they join a group of goatherds for the night and learn the tale of the woman Marcela, who was the cause of Chrysostom’s death, for he loved her and she rejected him. As they go to the funeral, Marcela appears and makes her case for her not being at fault for his death, for she told him that she was not interested in marriage when they first met. Afterward, they go to an inn for the evening, which he mistakes again for another castle. There, the women attend to Don Quixote’s wounds, and he believes that the innkeeper’s daughter has fallen in love with him and will come to try and tempt him to sleep with her, when in actuality, Maritornes, the servant woman, is coming in to share a bed with a carrier, who also happens to be sleeping in the same space as Sancho and Don Quixote. She accidentally goes to the wrong bed, and Don Quixote mistakes her for the daughter, and he tries to woo her, causing the carrier to be angry and attack. Everyone is fighting when the innkeeper comes to see what is going on. Don Quixote is passed out but believing he is dead, the officer in the inn starts an investigation.

From that moment on, Don Quixote believes the inn is enchanted, and tells Sancho so. When the officer comes in the room, Don Quixote insults him, and the officer beats him again. Don Quixote promises to heal Sancho with a potion or balsam, which calms Sancho’s anger, but after they make it and drink it, they are immediately very sick. Sancho is upset again, but then Don Quixote claims it doesn’t work on squires. They leave the inn, and refuse to pay because knights don’t pay at castles, and he rides away, but Sancho is captured and thrown and tossed in a blanket. Too hurt to get off his horse, Don Quixote watches, believing it all an enchantment, and while all the commotion is going on, the innkeeper steals Sancho’s saddle bags as payment for their stay.

They soon encounter clouds of dust, which Don Quixote thinks is two great armies, but which is actually herds of sheep, and he rides off, killing many sheep before the shepherds are able to unseat him from his horse. His explanation for the sudden change is again the sorcerer. That evening as they discuss their misfortunes, they come across mourning priests escorting a dead body; they refuse to identify themselves, and Quixote knocks one off of his horse, causing all of them to flee. Sancho, meanwhile, steals goods from the mule the priest was riding, and when the priest leaves, Sancho yells after him that this was the work of Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. Don Quixote loves the title, and when he asks why he chose that, Sancho tells him that after his teeth had been badly damaged in battle, he always looks sad without them. Rather than give Sancho credit for the name, he tells him that the name was the idea of the Sage writing his life story, and that he gave it to Sancho.

Next, they see a barber travelling with a glittering basin, and Quixote believes it is the mythic Mambrino’s helmet, and he charges the barber, who runs away, leaving his mule and the basin. Sancho gets the mule’s saddle and saddle packs. He is also promised that he will have a lot of money when Don Quixote marries a rich princess.

Next, they encounter galley slaves being taken to work for their crimes, and although Sancho warns him about who they are and that the government is taking them, Don Quixote frees them and justifies it by saying that sometimes criminal actions are justified and necessary. When he tells the men to present themselves to Dulcinea, they beat him and run away with all of Sancho’s and Don Quixote’s belongings. At this point, Sancho is very concerned that the Holy Brotherhood will come after them for their misdeeds.

They next ride into the woods of the Sierra Morena, and one of the slaves accosts them again and steals Sancho’s donkey. However, they then find a saddle bag with money and clothing and a notebook, and Don Quixote gives Sancho that money to make up for the losses he’s incurred. They then see a naked man running through the woods, and they find him and hear his tale. His name is Cardenio, and he had a friend by the name of Ferdinant wooed a farmer’s daughter in secret, only he is afraid of what his father might say, so he, at the advice of Cardenio, his friend Ferdinand, asks his father for some money to go to buy some horses at Cardenio’s parents’ home. There he meets Lucinda, who is unparalleled in beauty. When he mentions that Lucinda loved books about chivalry, it gets Don Quixote talking about them, and he and Cardenio start to fight, and Cardenio runs away.

In order to do penance for what he has done, he goes deep into the woods. He also send Sancho with a dictated letter that he is to have written out and to take to Dulcinea while he is in the mountains. While Sancho is gone, Don Quixote determines that he will be like Amadis and pray in Dulcinea’s name, wandering the valley and writing poetry on the trees, going mad and rending his clothing as well. Sancho, meanwhile, runs into the priest and barber from his village and they ask him what is going on. He tells them everything, and they concoct a plan to get Quixote down from the mountains and back to the village. As they speak with Sancho, they realize that Don Quixote’s delusions have also infected Sancho, who believes Don Quixote will end up an emperor or archbishop, although he hopes not a clergyman because that will limit Sancho’s rewards.

The priest and barber borrow clothing from the innkeeper’s wife and they set out. The barber is dressed as a woman, who they are hoping Don Quixote will perform a favor for. They send Sancho ahead, telling him that he will tell Don Quixote some story about having seen Dulcinea and her response. While they wait for Sancho to bring him down the mountain a little ways, they run into Cardenio, who tells the rest of his story, explaining that Ferdinand, claiming he was wooing in Cardenio’s name, stole away Lucinda because her parents found his riches appealing. Lucinda ends up accepting his proposal, and Cardenio ran to the wilderness in grief and hatred.

While they are together, they meet a young woman named Dorothea, who tells her story of being wooed but resisting until he tricked her and she succumbed, afraid of being raped if she refused his marriage offer. Then he abandoned her, and she has been out chasing him; the party learns that the man was Ferdinand, the very man who had stolen away Lucinda. Cardenio, thrilled, learns that Ferdinand had found a letter revealing Lucinda’s love for Cardenio, and he vows to help avenge Dorothea. Dorothea then accepts the role of the damsel in distress to help the priest and barber get Don Quixote down from the mountain.

She tells Don Quixote of a giant who attacked and won her kingdom away from her and about how her father, a sorcerer, had told her that Don Quixote would be her avenger. She has him swear that he will undertake no other errand until he has helped her save her kingdom. As they all head down the mountain, Sancho gives more details of his trip to Toboso, and Don Quixote states that a sorcerer must have given him wings to fly there, because it is some distance to Toboso and he was back far too quickly for it to have been anything else. Then the young farm boy who Don Quixote thought he saved from the whip appears and tells him of his misfortunes, and he steals food and runs off, telling Don Quixote the world would be better off without interfering knights-errant.

They get back to the inn that Sancho and Don Quixote believe is enchanted, and that evening the priest reads some tales to them that came from the innkeeper’s collection. The tale he reads aloud tells of a man who had the most beautiful wife and a best friend, but he is dissatisfied because he does not know if his wife will always be faithful. He forces his friend to try to woo away his wife, which at first the friend tries not to do, but then, when his friend discovers the deception, has to do. He falls in love with the wife, and she with him, and the concoct a plan to prove her virtue to the him so that she can sleep with the friend whenever she wishes. The lady in waiting is also in on this, and she helps the scheme, but in return brings her lover to the castle whenever she pleases. This bothers the wife, but she cannot say anything about it.

Just then, Sancho bursts in and says that Don Quixote has slain the giant holding the princess’s kingdom, and he has his head. But instead, Don Quixote has been sleepwalking and has slashed the nice, full wineskins in the room he was sleeping in. Sancho, still believing it was the giant, is devastated that he cannot find the head and believes now he has lost his chance at a governorship. The priest continues the story after this interruption. One night, the husband finds that the lady-in-waiting is bringing her lover to the house, and in exchange for her life, she says she will tell him an important secret. But his wife, worried about the potential discovery, flees with his friend, and he dies of grief.

Ferdinand and Lucinda arrive in disguise to the inn, and he tells all present that he has kidnapped the girl after she tried to hide in a convent after running away from their marriage. They all reunite, and Dorothea gets Ferdinand and Cardenio receives Lucinda. At this point, Sancho is devastated that Dorothea is not a princess and he will not be rich. When Sancho tells Don Quixote, he gets angry at him and says that this is further evidence that the place is enchanted. Ferdinand agrees that Dorothea needs to keep up the act to help the priest and barber get Don Quixote home, so she does. At this point, a traveler arrives with a woman named Zoraida, and they learn that she is a Moor who is looking to be baptized after saving many Spanish men from imprisonment and falling in love with the man she is with.

All the people present, when they hear Don Quixote speak, are amazed at his intelligence, especially considering that he is so mad. That evening, they awake to the singing of a boy, and they discover that he is a lord who was in love with Clara, the daughter of a judge (who is the brother of the captive Spanish man Zoraida saved). She has never spoken with him, but she also loves him. Also that evening, Maritornes and the innkeeper’s daughter trick Don Quixote and get him hanging from the barn window by having him try and grab a harness through the window while standing atop Rocinante. He stays there all night until he falls in the morning as four horsemen arrive at the inn.

When the horsemen, servants of the young singer, discover him and try to bring him back, he refuses and the judge intervenes, asking him why he refuses to return home. The young man tells him of his love for his daughter. And as this is happening, two guests try to sneak out without paying, and a fight ensues. Don Quixote refuses to help the innkeeper because of his promise to Dorothea, angering the innkeeper, his wife, and daughter. About that time, the barber who was accosted by Sancho and Don Quixote arrives, sees his basin and the saddle pack, and demands it back. Sancho refuses, saying it is the spoils of war. Another fight breaks out, and the priest settles it by financially compensating all involved and hurt by the antics of Don Quixote and Sancho.

At this time, the Holy Brotherhood have arrived, and the recognize Don Quixote. They have a warrant for his arrest, and the priest convinces the Holy Brotherhood that Don Quixote is insane and it would be best to not arrest him but let him come home with them, because he cannot be held accountable for what he has done in madness. They determine that in order to get him back to the village, they need to build a cage on an ox cart to get him home. The barber pretends to be a sage dictating Don Quixote’s return to the village and his marriage to Dulcinea, and this prompts Don Quixote to accept he is enchanted and needs to experience affliction of this kinds. Still, he wonders why he travels slowly if he is enchanted.

They meet more people on the road, who speak together about Don Quixote. Sancho threatens the barber and priest and accuses them of being jailers, and the barber threatens to lock up Sancho too, so Sancho stays silent. He goes to talk to his master about the reality of the situation, and to prove that Don Quixote is not enchanted, he asks him if he needs to go to the bathroom, and when Don Quixote replies he does, Sancho tells him that it means he is not enchanted, for enchanted people have no such needs. He tells Sancho that there are many types of new enchantments.

The canon traveling with them starts talking to Don Quixote, and he is astounded at how easily Don Quixote mingles fact and fiction. As they talk, a goatherd is chastising a female goat. They go ask what is going on, and he talks about how he was a friend of Anselmo, the man in the story the priest read to them, and that he and his friends have been driven to a simple life because of the unfaithfulness of Leandra, a beautiful woman who ran away with a soldier to the woods and was then abandoned. She was put in a convent to recover her honor.

The goatherd, in his tale, insults Don Quixote, and they start to fight. Then Don Quixote mounts his horse, seeing an icon of the Virgin Mary which he believes to be a living, sorrowful woman. He attacks penitents on the road and ends up beaten again. Sancho believes him dead and mourns over his body, which wakes Don Quixote. They decide to go home since he is having such bad luck, and they will hopefully be able to go out again. They get home and Sancho’s wife asks what he has brought, and he promises her that he will have land and be a governor soon. Don Quixote is driven in the cart to his home, to the amazement of all in the village, and his niece and housekeeper care for him, worried that he will disappear again.

Discussion of Work
Don Quixote, considered the first, and quite often the best ever, novel, is of the picaresque genre. The work itself is very episodic: almost any scene could be taken out of the novel and read as its own short story about the knight errant. The work is also a frame narrative, with Cervantes as the main narrator, but with his narration coming from manuscripts written by other people, who have either listened to the tales firsthand or pieced it together from other sources. The obsession the author has with proving the reality of the narrative through such documentation speaks of the outward importance of the frame for readers, who enjoy this as a fictional history not unlike the books of chivalry that Don Quixote reads and becomes delusional over. The frame is made even further complex with the priest reading stories and there being fanciful romance stories like those of Cardenio’s and Zoraida’s.

The work itself raises questions about the powers of the written word and about how much access people should have to them or what people should be allowed to write. The blending of fact and fiction also becomes a concern, as the people note that Don Quixote and then Sancho, who seems to be a very rational and realistic man, cannot tell fiction and real life apart, even bringing fictional beliefs into real world situations with them.

The work itself speaks to the fact that many storytelling devices were in existence long before the novel, and the things we may consider innovations of later periods, like the frame narrative, were in fact well-developed early on in other forms of storytelling. This novel is also a great example of how a roguish character who causes all sorts of mischief can be both likable and hilarious while doing misdeeds in good spirit. Even far into the novel, readers don’t get tired of his adventures, even in their similarity, because there are always new people he encounters with interesting stories and interesting reactions to Don Quixote’s madness.

by bluesyjune

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1831. Dover Publications, Inc, 1994.

Summary of Work
This novel begins with a series of letters from Robert Walton to his sister Margaret; he is preparing for a journey to find a passage to the Pacific through the North Pole or discover something of equal importance, but he feels alone and cannot make friends with his shipmates because of their difference in social class. Still, he feels confident he’ll achieve his goals. When they reach the North Pole and his ship gets stuck in the ice, they see a monstrous creature traversing the ice. And the next day they see another person trying to make their way across the ice, but stranded on an ice floe with all but one dead dog to pull his sled: the man is almost dead. Walton helps him live, they become friends, and the man tells Walton his life story and what led him to the North Pole. Walton then gets permission to tell his friend’s story.

Born to a good family, Victor Frankenstein grows up with a kind mother and father and a ward who is later adopted, Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Victor were best friends, and he also has a good schoolfriend named Henry. As they all grew older, Victor became obsessed with the natural world and the occult sciences. He starts studying alchemy enthusiastically, but when lightening strikes a tree near his house and destroys it, he learns about electricity and then finds alchemy outdated.

Ending his teenage years, he goes to Geneva to college, but before he can leave, his mother catches scarlet fever and dies. Her one wish on her deathbed is that Elizabeth and Victor marry. He is still grieving when he leaves to college. He determines once he gets there that he will study the sciences, and he ignores his social life and devotes his life to studies, making great progress. He begins studying anatomy and death, and soon his professors have no more to teach him, so he decides he will teach himself and discover the secret to creating life. Using his knowledge, he builds a creature from body parts of dead criminals, imagining that he will be the god of a new race.

When he finishes his creation, he brings it to life, but when he sees it animate, it terrifies him, and he leaves the room to try and sleep, haunted by the ghost of his mother’s corpse and nightmares about Elizabeth. The monster is smiling at him over his bed when he awakes, scaring Victor even further, and he runs from the house, leaving the creature there, and he is unwilling to return to his apartment. While out, he runs into his childhood friend Henry, and they start talking and he takes him back to the apartment. The creature is gone, but it causes Victor a nervous break that lasts for months, and Henry helps nurse him back to health.

Elizabeth writes him while he is ill and begs him to come to Geneva, but he determines at first to stay and help Henry around the university. He introduces him to his professors, but soon finds that any small reminder of his past deeds, seen in every scientific instrument and every professor, worsens his illness. Seeing this, he decides to go to Geneva and writes his father to learn when he should go. He goes with Henry into the country to wait and enjoy nature. But when they return, Victor learns from his father’s letter that his youngest brother, William, has been murdered, which shocks Victor and makes him set out immediately for Geneva.

He gets there at such a late hour that he cannot enter his family’s property, so he walks around out in the woods and comes across his creation. This makes him certain that his monster killed his little brother. But upon entering the home, he learns that the woman Justine, who had lived with them as a ward earlier in life, has been accused of his murder. The evidence they have is a picture of Caroline Frankenstein that had been William’s, but was in Justine’s pocket after the murder. Victor claims she is innocent, but since he refuses to provide any evidence and the evidence they have cannot be denied, Justine confesses her crime to gain salvation, but tells Elizabeth and Victor that she is in fact innocent of the crime. Still, Justine is executed for the crime she didn’t commit. Victor is doubly guilty now, seeing that the monster has now taken two of his family members.

His father takes what remains of his family on vacation, hoping it will cheer everyone. Victor tries to put on a good show, but even the short bursts of happiness don’t last long. He goes again to nature to appease him and heal him, climbing Montanvert to the glacier, and just as he finds himself consoled, the monster appears. Victor threatens the monster, but he is far too quick for Victor. The monster tells him that he would like to speak to him, and persuades him to go back to his cave, where there is a fire waiting. The monster then discusses his life since his animation.

The monster speaks of his confusion upon waking, his flight from the apartment and his learning of basic life knowledge: hunger, cold, heat, etc. He comes upon his first human encounters outside of Victor, and the man who sees him is very afraid, and other people run away upon seeing him. After these experiences, he decides to hide from humans, but he does observe them and finds that they are often unhappy, but then learns that they are living in poverty and he has been making it worse by stealing food from them. He starts bringing wood to their house to compensate them for their losses, and when he does so he hears language for the first time. He listens to them in order to learn, and he comes to love them.

When a foreign woman comes to the cottage, the people teach her to speak English, and the creature jumps at the opportunity to listen in and learn better. As he continues to observe them and listen, he realizes that he is alone in the world and ugly. He learns that the family are also a group of outcasts, not unlike himself: they were caught trying to save a man from prison, and their wealth was stripped from them and they were exiled.

The creature by this point has learned to forage for food, and he finds some books in a satchel on the ground one night, and he determines that he should read them. One of the books is Paradise Lost, which he reads as fact rather than fiction. He then finds some of Victor’s old papers in his clothing and discovers how he was made, which disgusts him further. He wants to talk to someone, and decides he should reveal himself to the cottagers. He approaches the blind man first when he believes all the others are away, but they are home unexpectedly and the creature is driven away. This causes him to determine that he will take revenge on all humans, but especially Victor. Still, he cannot fully follow through with the claim on his way to Geneva, where he rescues a drowning girl. But the man with her believes she is being attacked, and he shoots the monster.

Upset and enraged, he runs into William in the woods in Geneva, and upon hearing that the child is a Frankenstein, strangles him to death and then plants the photo on the sleeping Justine to frame her for the murder. And having finished his tale, he instructs Victor that he will be making a mate for him or he will continue to murder. Afraid and feeling trapped, Victor says he will create another creature, but he needs to go to England to get his notes on how to do it. Victor is filled with grief and doubts about the affair.

Victor’s father thinks his son’s grief is over his impending marriage to Elizabeth, but Victor ensures him that isn’t so, that Elizabeth is his only happiness. Still, he refuses to marry her until the task he has set out to do is done, and asks his father if he can travel to England first. Victor, his father, and Henry prepare a two year trip, and Henry is particularly excited because he wants to start his studies up. When they get to Scotland, Victor pawns off Henry to tour the country and he starts off to an island to complete his project. But unlike the first time he worked on the project, this time he finds it grotesque. He starts thinking about what will happen when he finishes his work, and with his concern, he destroys his work. The monster appears, enraged, and tells Victor that he will pay for it on his wedding night.

Henry is tired of Scotland and wants to leave, so Victor cleans up his space and disposes of the body parts in the ocean, only to get swept out to sea with the winds. The wind eventually dies down, but when he returns in the morning, he finds himself wanted for murder. The magistrate has him look upon the dead body, which is the body of Henry, and Victor becomes very ill immediately and remains so for months. When he recovers his wits, he is in prison. His father comes to visit him, and during the trial Victor is acquitted.

When they get home, Victor marries Elizabeth, and she tells him that she has a secret that she can only tell him once she is married to him. They go to spend the night at a family cottage, and they walk the grounds in the evening. What should be a beautiful night is sullied by Victor’s worries about the impending arrival of the monster. He thinks that he will be dying that evening, and sends Elizabeth to bed before he goes in. When he hears her scream, he realizes that the monster wants him to lose everyone. The tragedy of her death sends his father into a piteous state, and he dies a few days later. Deciding that it is time to tell someone of his misdeeds, Victor tries to convince a magistrate of the existence of the creature, but he does not believe Victor. After that, he determines that he will spend the rest of his life hunting the monster to destroy it. This led Victor to the North Pole.

At the end of the narrative, Walton says he believes Victor. Then his men start to entreat him to be able to go back home when they break free of the ice, and Victor states that they should not and gives a rousing speech, but that does not convince them, and Walton consents to head home if they break free of the ice. Just before they are going to be able to leave, Walton hears a noise and comes upon the monster weeping over his creator’s body. He tells Walton that he regrets having become a murderous creature, and that he would like to die now that his creator is dead. He leaves the ship and is never seen again.

Discussion of Work
This work’s main themes are of monstrosity, creation and science, and nature. Victor’s character may be said to be the real monstrous being, as his obsessions and passions lead him to performing unconscionable acts. He becomes an all-powerful necromancer, but without the same techniques and skills as God; he cannot create anything but horror. The dead body parts coming from criminals also speak to a belief that only wickedness can come from wickedness, a belief that Victor does not hold upon his initial entry into the work of creation. When the creature awakes, he is much like an infant, and Frankenstein cannot deal with what he has created, incapable of seeing the clean slate that he has created and instead only seeing his poor handiwork in creation of the body, which is several times the size of a normal human being. The creature’s initial forays into the world bring forward a discussion of nature vs. nurture.

Science is also a large portion of the book’s discussion, as alchemy, electricity, chemistry, and biology are all part of Victor’s development. The subjects themselves seem innocuous, but in the hands of the obsessed man, they become tools for a madman’s monstrosities. The science is seemingly pitted against God and his goodness, as what is created from the science that Victor utilizes turns into a great evil.

Nature plays the part of the healer, as it is the only space that any of the characters, particularly Victor and his creature, can find any solace or relief. This is particularly true of Victor, who regularly goes to the woods or to any space where natural growth lives in order to clear his mind and rid himself, either figuratively or literally, of the creature he’s created. It lies in stark contrast to the dead, reanimated flesh that is the creature himself.

by bluesyjune

Langston Hughes, The Big Sea

Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. 1940. U of Missouri P, 2001.

Summary of Work
This autobiography of Langston Hughes’s life details some of his life experiences from his early twenties into the end of his twenties and the beginning of the Great Depression. When he was a child, his parents split, and he lived with his mother for a time. He remembers having his parents try to get back together in Mexico, but that was the year of the great earthquake in Mexico City, and so his mother got scared and they went back. He was sent to live with his grandmother in Kansas and to go to school, and she was a proud woman who would never do service jobs for white people to earn a living. When she died when he was just before his teenage years, he went to go live with his Aunt. During this time his Aunt took him to a Christian church, where they were praying over people to be saved. Everyone had gone up but him, because he believed he would get to see Jesus in the flesh, and he did not want to be dishonest about coming to Jesus. Finally, filled with guilt that he is the only one who hasn’t been saved, he comes to the front at the alter, and his Aunt is overjoyed. That night, he cries over having lied. His mother remarried, and he liked the man. Hughes was elected the poet for his school (it was integrated) because people made assumptions that all black people had rhythm and could dance, so they must be able to write poetry. He wrote his first poems there. He admits that his entire life, he rarely majorly edited poetry once it was down on the page. He also admits that most of his poetry and other work was written when he was miserable or unhappy rather than when he was happy.

In his late teenage years, his biological father wrote to him that he wanted him to come down to Mexico. His mother was upset about it, but he went anyway. There, he found out that his father was considered very American because all he cared about was money, but he was wiser than other Americans that came to Mexico because he was interested in keeping and saving his money. He hated Mexicans and many black people, and all poor people. Hughes was fairly miserable his first year there, because his father was always trying to force him to hurry places, and because he had to do bookkeeping and was no good with numbers. He got so angry at his father that it made him physically ill and he couldn’t eat for weeks, which landed him in a hospital that cost his father $20 a day to keep him there. After he was feeling better, his father sent him back to the US.  But the next time he went down to stay with his father, he spent more time to learn Spanish and became better friends with the Mexicans in town. A German woman also stayed with them (she later became his father’s wife), and she made the space more pleasant. His father expressed that he wanted to send him to college somewhere in Europe and have him come back to Mexico to be an engineer, but Hughes said he wanted to be a writer and did not want to go learn things he was no good at. His father told him that writers made no money and that if he was going to pay for college, Hughes would go where he wanted him to. He would also not be allowed to leave Mexico until he agreed to his father’s wishes.

So in order to escape, Hughes started tutoring Mexican children so they could speak English. Word spread that he was good at his job, and soon he was able to raise his rates and take on as much work as he wanted. He also got offered two jobs at colleges to teach English, and he took both jobs because scheduling worked for him. While working these jobs, he is lucky to narrowly escape death because a man who the German woman’s relation was working for thought that the German girl was sleeping with Hughes, and he, enraged, came to the house, shot the girl in the head three times, and went in search of Hughes to kill him, but couldn’t find him because he wasn’t home. The girl miraculously survived, and the man was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Hughes had made quite a bit of money, and he started thinking that he did want to go to college, but in NYC at Columbia. He and his father fought about it, but eventually his father agreed to send him there. On the train to New York City, he was mistaken as Mexican and when he said he was black, white people in the South would not serve him. He remembered the struggles of living as a black man in the US, and contemplated why it was so difficult for white people to interact with black people in the US when it was so easy for them to do so in other countries. He spent a year at Columbia, only to find he really disliked college, and so he quit and started looking for a job. But his father at that point had cut him off, his mother was looking for work and struggling, and he could not find a job that would take him, even if it were available, because he was a black man. He finally found a job working at a shipyard, and in the meantime he was having some of his poetry published by Crisis magazine. Alain Locke wanted to meet him and he had met several major figures of the New Negro movement, but he told Locke no because he was nervous and because he knew that Locke wouldn’t be able to get his way around the docks very easily and it could kill him if he weren’t careful. Before Hughes sets off to sea on his first voyage, he tosses all his books from college into the ocean, ridding himself of their weight both literally and figuratively.

Hughes set sail to Africa eventually and landed in many ports to find that the Africans did not consider him a black man because his skin was more brown than black. This astonished him, and he also saw the terrible effects of colonialization. He recalls having to watch a prostitute and a young girl coming on board in hopes of receiving money, and receiving no money but being forced to have sex with all the men on board who were interested, which was a group of about 30 men. He tired of this type of exploitation as well as the economic exploitation. As they were about to leave, he bought a red monkey, and many of the other soldiers did as well. There were adventures on the ship with those monkeys getting loose and winding up drowned or in missionaries’ beds or in the masts, but eventually all were caught. There were also many more antics and debauchery, and all the men were fired upon returning to the US. Hughes made his way to Cleveland, where his family was staying, and found himself penniless in order to make it there with the monkey, named Jocko, who he had bought for his younger brother. His mother was very upset to have it in the home, but his stepfather and brother liked it, so the monkey stayed. Then his stepfather’s mother came to town, and his mother had an ally to protest about the monkey. Then when his stepfather had the monkey out on the town one night and it got scared and destroyed the carpeting of a pool table, it cost them 25 dollars to have it replaced, and his mother was furious. Not long after Hughes left to go back to sea, she sold the monkey.

His second voyage, he got off to stay in Paris, but found himself unable to get a job because he was not a musician, dancer, or performer. He makes friends with a Russian dancer who got sick and whose company had dissolved, and who had no money. They share a cheap room, and she finds a job before he does. He finally gets a job as a doorman and then, through someone who liked his poetry, found a job as a dishwasher and then a cook. When the club he is working at goes nearly bust, they tried to fire the head cook, and he brought out a knife and threatened everyone, and they let him stay. And when they tried to fire Hughes, he threatened them again, so he got a job as a waiter. During his time there, he saw many fights and other antics. The Russian lady got a job at La Havre, and she leaves him, very sad. He then falls in love with a girl named Mary, who is very well-to-do. But when her father finds out what she’s been doing, first she is very chaperoned, and then she is forced to leave. Soon after that, he spends some time with Alain Locke, who is in town, and then when one day he is waiting on a famous poet, he shares his work. The poet “discovers” Hughes, and then he became wildly popular and many people came to the club looking to get a photo with the poet. He has more poems published but is never paid for them.

When the club had to close down for refurbishment and because of lack of business, he goes with some Italians to see Italy. He has enough money to enjoy his time, and Locke is also there and takes him to Venice and they enjoy their time. However, while in Genoa, he has his passport and all his money stolen, and the US embassy and consulate refuse to help him, so he lives homeless and in poverty, unable to get a job that will pay him enough to either get back to France or to find safe passage to America. He finally gets passage as a workman on a ship bound for NYC, and he is nearly kicked off in Spain for being late back to the ship, but he makes it back to the US with a quarter more than he had in France when he first landed. He makes his way to Washington, where his relatives are, and they want him to work in the Library of Congress, but it has too many needed qualifications and Hughes needed work, so he started working doing wet wash laundry for twelve dollars a week. His mother and the relatives had a dispute, and so he found them different accommodations, and they struggled to make ends meet. Carl Van Vechten contacted him and helped him publish a book of poetry at this point, but the elitist community would not welcome him or his mother because they were poor.

He makes his way back to Harlem in hopes of going to college, but he can’t get a scholarship. He talks of meeting Van Vechten and Jean Toomer, who could pass as white and refused to be labeled a “Negro Artist” much to critics’ dismay. He also met Zora Neale Hurston, who he had a good relationship for years until a dispute over a co-writing project. He speaks of Vechten and his parties, the decadence of the Harlem Renaissance and how the area was a victim of its own image. Hughes finally makes a bit of money off of some poetry, works as a personal assistant for a time, gets patronage to go to college at Lincoln, and visits and explores the South and takes a short voyage to Cuba and Jamaica, which he liked very much and would have kept doing if he hadn’t had to go back to college. During his final college years, he wrote a survey of the issues of the color line at Lincoln college, where all white professors taught a nearly all black student body. The founder of the college came up to him at graduation to tell him that as time passed, he would see that there was no way for him to do what he did in founding the school unless he could have had white patronage and made concessions. Hughes disagreed with him.

Around this time, he also received patronage to write and finish his novel Not Without Laughter, which he wishes would have been better because it is about the best of his family members. He receives a major literary award for it. He tries to write other things, but the white patron dislikes his work, and finally they part ways, and it makes him sick like he was with his father. He remembers all the decadence and security he experienced and remembers seeing the other people in the street starving because of the depression, and he remembers the disgust the white chauffeur had over being forced to drive a black man places. He went to the doctor to see what was wrong and spent a lot of money doing it, was told first he had a Japanese tape worm, and then told by a white doctor that he had no such thing. Then he got tonsillitis and had to have them out, using up the last of his money from the Park Street patron. After that, he immediately got better from his illness brought on by anger over the patron. It is during this time that he had his dispute with Hurston over the play they had been working on, and while it had been in production, it had to be shut down over the dispute. After that he went to Haiti and decided that he would make money writing for a living, and at the time of writing the autobiography, that is what he had done successfully.

Discussion of Work
This book gives an adventurous story about Langston Hughes’s life during his twenties. Its major dealings in terms of themes that cut across works of African American writing are the color line, economic oppression and poverty, travel narratives, and artistry, particularly writing and music. Hughes regularly comments on the struggles of being a black man, particularly when it comes to finding housing or a job. While he knows that other races are discriminated against, he knows they also have an easier time finding work, which makes all the difference. And he struggles with the knowledge that many of the black elite are not interested in changing the situation because they feel that there can be no progress unless they tell the white people what they want to hear. He states that while the Harlem Renaissance was happening, the majority of the black communities in America felt nothing change in their situation or economic or social standings. Economics and travel go hand-in-hand for Hughes, who travels in order to get money, which he can never keep as he comes back to the US, or even as he simply travels from one country to another. Job opportunities do not change, and while he doesn’t experience the same type of color prejudice, he does experience it in that the natives of the countries he visits dislike him for being a threat to their jobs.

Artistry is the other large portion of this narrative. He shows several of his poems and discusses when he wrote them and why. Much of his work was strongly influenced by blues songs and structures, which can be seen throughout much of his poetry with the AAB writing format, just as many blues lyrics are written. He also talks about how dance and music were a rich part of many black people’s lives, specifically citing the many rent parties and house parties he went to, some of which were certainly to help pay people’s rent, but others which were just hosted to be hosted. He provides several examples of printed up tickets for these events. He states that these parties were the spaces where he liked to be because black artistry was not put on display for racist white audiences. His understanding of what it is to be a black man or a black person in general is changed and given more value in an all-black space.

However, he also discusses the problems that come with the assumptions that all black people have rhythm and can dance and sing: he could not dance or sing, and those were almost the only jobs available to him in Europe and even in the US. The stereotype led to success for some, but not for long for many: once they were injured or could no longer work or could not work the grueling schedules or create enough new material, they often died in poverty. It ultimately narrowed black people’s options and avenues for success, even as it provided a rich culture and outlet for many. In discussion of his own work, he also talks about how a narrow view of what black artists should create doomed his work Fine Clothes to the Jew because critics and general public readers alike felt that the dialect and blues structures should not be used in his art: white people saw enough of that elsewhere, and writing was supposed to highlight the best to show people that black artists were capable of high art. The strict rules placed upon what a black artist could write or create further limited what people read, and who could be successful in the field of art.

by bluesyjune

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and

Other Writings. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007.

Summary of Work
The unnamed narrator of this novel starts out discussing his life from early childhood. Raised by a single mother in Georgia, they soon move to Connecticut and he starts going to public school there. He shows talent as a piano prodigy, and enjoys time with his white friend “Red.” He finds himself fascinated with the black students in his school, particularly “Shiny,” the very dark black boy who is the smartest kid in the class. While in school one day, the principal comes into the classroom and asks the white students to stand. When he stands, he is asked to sit down, and this is how he discovers that he is, in fact, an African American. He confronts his mother about it, who tells him that she is African American and that his father is a white man of acclaim. He does get to see his father one more time (he had occasionally visited them in Georgia), and the meeting is awkward. He sends his son a piano, and then never visits again. The narrator devotes himself to learning music and reading, and has a short crush on a violinist.

The narrator still struggles with race, and he and his mother have a long talk about it, and she will never criticize his father even though he left her, married a white woman, and won’t acknowledge his son. Still confused about how he should feel, he continues school, graduates, and then starts thinking about college, Shiny’s graduation speech still fresh on his mind. He raises money for college through his music, and is thinking about going to an Ivy League school when his mother unexpectedly dies, and he decides to return to Georgia and enroll in Atlanta University. However, when he gets to Atlanta, he has all of his money stolen and rather than go to the Dean to talk about it, he decides not to enter college and find work all around the South. He starts working in hotels in Florida and then ends up working as a cigar maker and a reader (a person who reads books and newspapers aloud to the cigar-workers). While there, he starts thinking of the different types of black people, and decides that there are the very poor and desperate black people, the middle class of domestic servants, and the educated.

He decides that he is of the educated class, and so when the cigar factory shuts down, he heads to NYC with some other men. They go to a gambling house, and the narrator becomes addicted to it. He is also introduced to ragtime music, which he ends up learning to play in order to make ends meet because he needs employment and he feels he might as well be employed at the club. His playing catches the attention of a rich white man, who starts inviting him to play for dinner parties at his house. Soon he is employed by the white man full time, and he finds himself with more free time. He meets a rich white widow, and he starts flirting with her, but her black companion gets upset and jealous and ends up shooting the woman in the head, killing her. The narrator worries he will be implicated in the death, and he tells his employer, who offers him the opportunity to escape with him to Europe.

He takes the offer, and their first stop is Paris. The narrator takes time to learn the language through reading newspapers and he falls in love with the city. Then, they head to London, which he finds charming as well, and then they head to Germany to visit two cities. In Berlin, he hears ragtime turned into a classical concert piece, and he desires to head back to America and start composing music. The white man tries to talk him out of it, saying that he could be a successful man in Europe and pass as white, whereas he will find all sorts of problems waiting for him in America if he goes back and claims his black blood and heritage. But the narrator does not listen to the white man, and goes back to the South to look for inspiration from the black community.

He spends time in churches, talking to doctors, teachers, and others in the black communities in Georgia, thinking upon the differences between Northerners and Southerners as well as what black people spend their time ruminating on or obsessing or passionate about, particularly when that topic is race. Then, one evening in Macon he witnesses a lynching and burning of a black man, and it scares him so badly that he determines that since he can pass as white, he will in order to avoid the same fate. He goes back to NYC and after some time unemployed, manages to find work at a business college, where his Spanish speaking skills come in handy and help him move up into a better career position. He builds a fortune through real estate, and life seems to be going perfectly for him, until he falls in love with a white woman, and he is forced to confront the issue of his race again.

The narrator determines that he wants to marry this woman, but also decides that he must tell her about his race first so that he is entering the situation honestly and so she can make her own decision. When he tells her, it breaks her heart, and she doesn’t answer his proposal and leaves NYC for the summer. He remains in agony over not knowing how the situation will end or what she will say to others or what she will do, but she comes back in the Fall and accepts his marriage proposal. They start a family, and they all live happily because both him and the kids pass as white. However, tragedy strikes when his wife dies in childbirth during the birth of their second child. Raising the kids alone, he determines that he is happy for the most part that he chose to pass as white, especially to help his children. But still, he wonders if he didn’t sell his birthright for something worthless or of less worth in the end.

Discussion of Work
The main, and obvious, exploration in this work is that of passing. What does it say about race that people can pass as white? It brings to light the fact that we tend to stereotype race as one specific skin color or look, when in fact skin color within cultural groups is quite diverse; it also, much like in Nella Larsen’s Passing, reveals just how much race is a social construct that works against specific minority groups in order to allow for the power structures of white supremacy to rule. Themes of identity are also very important to this novel, as it is the realization that his constructed identity in childhood was not reality that drives the struggle he has with his biracial identity; he belongs in neither space fully, because he identifies with neither culture fully. The theme of identity allows readers to explore the nature of decision-making processes about identity and race as well: many of the narrator’s actions stem from his belief (founded in the reality of a society that believes if a person has any African American blood, they are black and cannot be anything else) that he can only accept one portion of his family heritage. He struggles to choose between his mother’s heritage and his father’s, fully recognizing that socioeconomic privilege comes from one, where oppression and lack of opportunity comes with the other because of the racism in the USA.

Outside of his own community, he can pass as white, but he struggles with a moral question whenever he considers taking that privilege: is it right to lie to people about my heritage in order to gain economic and social privilege, and if I do, am I betraying the black race? In a society that often robbed black people of economic freedom by denying them jobs, paying them unfair wages, and by forcing them into poorer neighborhoods which were not kept to health and safety codes and had higher crime rates, being black became a social status that severely limited economic prosperity. For black people who had light enough skin to pass as white, there was real incentive to deny their heritage in favor of the privileges inherent in whiteness: while black people were limited in the colleges they could attend, the professions they could enter, and the places they could live, white people could enter any college, take any job they were qualified for, and live where they could afford.

Such disadvantages and privileges based on race weren’t simply apparent to the black people in the US, but also to the white people. Johnson’s narrator describes the way white people discuss the Negro Problem as not just a passing conversational topic, but an obsession, a dangerous subject that if unaddressed, would lead to intermixing of the races and destruction of white superiority and purity. It was economically and socially essential for white people to find solutions to this racial problem, to create racial separation and barriers in order to keep the white political patriarchy in power. Allowing blacks the same privileges as white people would introduce more competition into the markets, both economic and social, and potentially reverse the political, social, and economic hierarchy that whites had enjoyed sitting at the top of for centuries in America.

The narrator highlights this hierarchy and the efforts to maintain it as he interacts with a variety of people from different races, culminating in the philosophy of the Millionaire: there is no helping an entire race, only individual people, and that if a black man looks white enough, he should do what’s best for him, and assume whiteness rather than struggle his whole life to inevitably fail in the quest for equal rights for his race. The Millionaire, basing his belief in economic and social class knowledge, highlights what is possibly the most important discussion that needs to be had about race in America: how economics and social class influences the way marginalized groups are seen and treated, how they are limited in their ability to prosper economically and socially because they are seen as a threat to the majority race. The shame the narrator feels about his defection to the white race in order to gain social and economic prosperity should make readers consider that whiteness is privilege, both economic and social, and that turning our backs less privileged groups will not make the problem disappear.

by bluesyjune

Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness'”

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness.” Massachusetts Review, 1977,

polonistyka.amu.edu.pl/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/259954/Chinua-Achebe,-

An-Image-of-Africa.-Racism-in-Conrads-Heart-of-Darkness.pdf.

Summary of Work
In this article, Achebe discusses the racism that the West holds, particularly in its views of Africa. He builds his argument around Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness, the story of a narrator’s journey through the Congo to find one Mr. Kurtz. He states that the images, particularly in Conrad’s obsession with blackness and the darkness of not just the Natives’ skin color, but the land itself, shows Africa as the antithesis to England and the rest of the civilized world: Conrad is obsessed with the primitive nature of Africa and its people in an attempt to show that Europe was able to conquer that darkness, but that there is danger in interacting with people and places who have not yet conquered that savagery, because the savagery could engulf the civilized and lead them back to primitivism.

Conrad is unkind to the native peoples in his novel, showing them always in a frenzy, or dying, or otherwise running around. They are not given language, but grunts and sounds and physical actions. The only two times when they are given language are when they are cannibals asking for people to eat or the slave man telling the narrator that Mr. Kurtz is dead: those examples, Achebe states, are purposeful in that they are made to show how horrific these people are and how awful the state they are in as black people. Given these images, it is clear that Conrad is racist, and it is surprising to Achebe that in all the years of scholarship, no one seems to even want to admit that or deal with it. It is a blind spot in the Western world because people in the West have so long used Africa as a foil of themselves, insisting that Africa is as backward as Europe is enlightened. So when people say that they are not aware that Africa has art or history, it is part of that tradition of racism and colonialism. In order for any good or real communication between Africa and Europe and North America to happen, the West must first relinquish its long-held beliefs about the primitiveness of the African continent and the African people.

Discussion of Work
This piece discusses racism in a way that I think is very telling: it shows that what has happened is that the West has fallen prey to a single story about Africa. A single story is powerful, in that it can give people motivations or reasons to conquer or oppress people in the name of “saving” them or bringing them enlightenment of some sort. But as powerful as those stories are, they are also wrong and dangerous because they allow for people to do terrible things by dehumanizing others. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses a very similar thing in a TED Talk that she gives called “The Danger of the Single Story,” where she states that her teachers once told her that her novel was not “authentically African” because people were not poor, starving, or otherwise destitute or unenlightened: her characters looked too much like the average Western person.

The image of Africa and its people as backwards and primitive exists in many forms today, including that we group the whole African continent together as a group and remain largely ignorant to the fact that Africa is composed of many countries, just like the Americas Europe, and Asia. The issues set forth by Achebe in his essay are still very prominent today in that by and large, no one seems to question the idea of the single story of Africa as exactly what Conrad set forth, despite the fact that it was never that way, that there were diverse people, languages, art, and nations. And today, while there certainly are areas of Africa that have poor and starving people who cannot read and live what the West would consider primitive lives, there are far more people who are living in sophisticated cities with functioning governments and thriving businesses; there are people who create wonderful art and products and enjoy many different activities that Western people also enjoy.

The power dynamics inherent in the way we discuss Africa and its people says much about the Western world’s continued need for dominance: a way to prove that they are still more enlightened than the people who live on and descend from ancestors on the African continent. I agree with Achebe’s statement that we cannot just hand the West a happy pass on this issue or offer them a positive note to end the discussion on. Such a positivity cannot come until the West chooses to change its views and discussions on Africa, because the way it is currently being discussed is wrong, and there should be no cookies given out for fixing something that should never have been considered acceptable in the first place.

by bluesyjune

Nella Larsen, Passing

Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1929. Penguin, 1997.

Summary of Work
Irene Redfield has received a letter from a woman she grew up with in Chicago. It is a letter begging her to call on Clare Kendry, and after having seen Clare in Chicago, she does not wish to ever again. Irene remembers back to being in Chicago and visiting family and friends there. She was out and about looking for gifts to give her children when she and they returned to New York—her boys were at a summer camp—and after seeing a man faint on the sidewalk, she also became faint, and had a taxi driver take her somewhere for tea. He takes her to a whites only hotel, assuming because of her skin color that she is white, and she goes up to have tea. Irene can pass as white, but has a black husband and her boys are darker skinned. While Irene is having tea, a woman comes in who she thinks is beautiful, but rude because she won’t stop staring at her. Irene is just about to leave when the woman comes over and says she knows her. She calls her Rene, a name that she hasn’t been called since high school. After awhile she remembers who it is: Clare Kendry. It is the dark eyes that give her away.

She remembers Clare’s past, with a white father who was a janitor at the school and always drunk. When he died, Clare cried with fury but stopped as suddenly as she started. She was in her mid teens, and Irene was certain that the crying was more over frustration and anger at her father than sadness. After that her two white aunts took her to live, and then Clare never came to the South Side but rarely, until not at all. She was seen with white men parading around town in fancy dress, and rumors started about her.

Clare sits down and asks her all sorts of questions about Irene and says very little about herself. When Irene absolutely has to go because she is already late to her dinner and bridge party, Clare begs that Irene take time in the next few days to see her again. At first Irene is hesitant and doesn’t want to, but she gives into Clare, much to her own annoyance. She discovers on the way out that Clare has married a white man who struck it rich in South America. She has all the money she could want and a little girl named Margery. She says that it was very easy to pass because she was part white and had white aunts, so her husband never suspected she had black blood in her. Her husband does not know that she is black, and her aunts didn’t say anything because Clare never told them that she was going to marry a white man on account of her fear that they might get a conscience and tell the man she was half black.

Irene ponders what Clare has said on the way home, and sees Clare the next week. Another woman, Margaret, has also been invited to tea at Clare’s home, which annoys Irene, having thought that it was going to be just the two of them again. Margaret was another school friend who had lighter skin and could pass as white. She married a white man, a butcher, and he did know she was half black, but didn’t care. He married her for love. They all spend some time talking, mostly about their children and the fear that when they were born they would come out dark (to which Irene is insulted because she is proud of her children regardless of skin color), and then just when Irene is about to leave, Clare’s husband, Jack Bellew, walks in. He calls Clare Nig, and Irene is just mortified that her husband would say such a thing. When he explains the nickname as meaning that the longer Clare’s alive the darker her skin gets, and he jokes with her that one day she will turn black. They realize, over the course of conversation, that he does not know that Clare is black, and that he hates black people so much that he will not even be in their presence. Irene can’t stop laughing aloud at the situation because he is duped: he is sitting in a room with three black women, and one of them is his wife.

Irene and Margaret talk on the way out about how horrible it would be to live a lie like that in order to pass as white. They both agree that it is dangerous for Clare, and that they are happy they are not in her position. When Irene goes home, she is excited to get back to New York City and never see Clare again. Yet here is this letter, sitting on her desk. She talks to her husband about it, who says it’s best she just turn her down and get it over with: the association isn’t worth the risk. Her husband, Brian, is a doctor who is well off; they are part of the black elite. When he married her, he wanted to go to Brazil and work, but after a large fight about it, he dropped the matter. She still knows it’s in his heart and he dreams to go travel, but she feels confident that he will stay and take care of her and his two boys. She wants to talk to her husband about Junior, their oldest, about going to a school in Europe, and she hopes that his taking him there will sate some of the wanderlust she can see in his eyes. But when she’s in the car with him, the way she brings it up causes a fight, and she leaves the car angry and he avoids the conversation after that.

She is preparing for a large ball for the black elite and wealthy whites who come to Harlem, and she is in charge of tickets and tables. It is a large job, and she is determined to do it right, but it takes up most of her time. By the time she gets home, she is exhausted. But there is a knock on the door, and it is Clare Kendry. She decides to allow her up, even though the servant is reluctant. Clare asks why Irene never answered her letter, and Irene doesn’t have a good answer at first. But she then talks to Clare about the dangers of her being in Harlem in the home of a black person when she is passing as white and her husband is unaware and hates black people so much. Clare shoos that thought away, saying that she really needs to have her black culture back and to participate, and she will only do so when Jack is out of town so he never needs to know. But then Irene says that Clare should remember her responsibility to her daughter, and Clare cannot brush that reasoning aside. But she still wants to spend time where she can. Irene says she simply cannot do anything with her, especially considering the ball, and when Clare finds out, she talks Irene into letting her come. Brian, when he finds out, is amused.

Clare goes to the ball with the Redfields, and she is extravagantly dressed, moreso than anyone else. She enjoys the ball, and dances with Brian a lot. Irene is happy that Clare is happy and that the ball is going well. Hugh Wentworth, a very wealthy white man, is also there, and he enjoys conversation with Irene. Clare is very eager to meet him, and Irene says she’ll introduce her. After that night, Clare comes quite regularly to the Redfields’ home and even plays with the boys, staying around even if they are the only ones in the home.

Christmastime comes along, and Irene is feeling bleak. She is tired of Clare Kendry, but at the same time can’t say why. She accidentally falls asleep, and she is hosting a party for Hugh that evening, so she is rushing to get ready when Brian comes in. She is about to tell him about the incident, but still can’t bring herself to. Then Brian says he invited Clare to the party, and Irene stops getting ready. He says that he thought it was surely a mistake Clare hadn’t been invited, and Clare was so crushed that he couldn’t help but invite her. It is at this moment that Irene realizes that Brian is cheating on her with Clare, and the look in Brian’s eyes tells her it is true. She tells him that she didn’t invite Clare because Hugh doesn’t like her; she’s pretty enough, but not the type of intelligence that Hugh enjoys. After that nearly starts a fight, Brian leaves. Irene loses herself in grief, but puts herself together enough to go down and host. Still, she is not herself, and Hugh notices. He observes the situation and gathers that Brian is being unfaithful, and Irene, to distract him from that fact, makes up a story about breaking the cup she dropped because she hated it but couldn’t ever get rid of the cup because it was a Civil War relic.

Irene, over the next few weeks, tries to tell herself she is making up the situation, but she never really believes herself. And she realizes how vulnerable her position is. Her boys will be fine, but she is dispensable. She wishes she could ruin Clare Kendry. She is out on the town with her friend Felise one afternoon, and when they are walking about shopping, she runs into Clare’s husband. She knows that Jack can see her linked arm in arm with a black person, and that it is dangerous for him to see that because of Clare’s secret. He holds out his hand and says hello, but she cannot shake it and quickly skirts around him. She does not stay out long with Felise after that, and thinks that she’d better tell Brian and Clare about what has happened. But when she gets home, she can’t bring herself to. She and Brian get in an argument over him talking to his sons about racism and lynching. She doesn’t want her children to have to deal with that as children, and he tells her to not force him to give up everything that matters. She is struck and hurt. Her only solace is that soon Clare will be gone to Switzerland to get her child Margery from school, and her husband Jack is forcing her to go.

When they go to a party at the Freelands, Irene is surprised to see Clare coming with them. She tells Clare that Pennsylvania is not very far away and that it is a huge risk for Clare to go. She sends Clare over to Brian to talk because she can’t explain to her why it’s dangerous. At that point, Clare realizes that Irene knows that she is stealing her husband, and Irene reconfirms what she knows. She is saddened, but not as grief stricken as the first time. They get to the Freelands and climb up the many flights of stairs to the top floor. They start enjoying themselves, and about halfway through the party, Jack bursts in. He calls her out for her lying about her race, and Clare, in fear, backs up, Irene tries to grab her arm, but it is too late; Clare has fallen out the window. She tumbles to the ground and dies instantly. Everyone runs down, but Irene stays. Was she a part of the reason Clare fell? Did she push her? Or did she fall of her own accord? She realizes that she needs to go down the stairs, and she realizes that Brian left his coat. She doesn’t want him to catch cold, so she brings the coat to him. She is losing her mind over this, and the men realize it as everyone is asking her about what happened. Brian has said he was sure he saw Jack push Clare out the window, but Irene insists that no, Clare simply fell. Jack is nowhere to be found. The men suggest they all go back up and get another look at the window.

Brief Note on Themes
The largest discussions within this book surround cultural identity and what happens when a person betrays that identity. Irene is very protective of her black community and culture, and feels that Clare doesn’t belong because she actively chose to leave it in order to have wealth and privilege, and now wants it back only out of a need for nostalgia and fun. Irene herself can pass as white, but doesn’t because she values her culture more than the privileges of whiteness. Yet Irene still benefits from those privileges when she is out alone in public. Passing is the act of being able to participate in the culture of the majority because of a light skin color. It was a way around Jim Crow laws for those who chose to renounce their heritage and community.

Clare and Irene’s relationship represents what is largely a broken female bond. Irene feels betrayed, and Clare keeps using Irene in order to relive her life after discovering that money and privilege do not offer her everything she wants. Racism still affects Clare even though her husband thinks she is white, because she still gets to hear his rants against her race; her biracial status places her between two cultures, and she cannot find a way to bridge them because of the racism her husband exhibits. Irene, on the other hand, has a need to control everything in her life, and not being able to control Clare causes her much grief. Her perfectly planned life leads her to be protective of her culture and community and family. Her relationship with Clare starts to force a break in that control, completed when she realizes Clare has stolen away her husband.

Racial tensions reach their height at the Freelands’ party, where Jack confronts Clare. Clare’s death, so quickly occurring, could be said to represent how vulnerable and fragile the black body, but particularly the female black body, is when confronted with racial violence. Lying about race proves more fatal than accepting racial identity and being open and honest about it.

 

by bluesyjune

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 2007. Riverhead Books, 2008.

Summary of Work
Yunior, the late boyfriend of Lola de León, narrates the story of Lola’s brother Oscar, who is the victim of what Yunior calls a fukú, a curse of death or destruction in the New World. He states that the whole curse is connected directly with the Trujillo regime, particularly Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. The only way to ward of the curse is to create a zafa, and Yunior, believing the curse has passed to him, wants his storytelling to be his zafa.

When Oscar was little, his family lived in new Jersey, and they were very proud of their beautiful son. He had two girlfriends, a true Dominican boy, but soon the threesome falls apart. From then on, Oscar cannot get a girlfriend, and he descends into eating and becomes morbidly obese. He has two friends, but even they leave him out when they get girlfriends. Despite his sister Lola and his Uncle Rudolfo trying to get him to lose more weight and participate in masculine activities so he can get a girlfriend, Oscar decides to focus on science fiction and writing, and he goes to Santo Domingo to be with his Nena Inca for a time.

When he gets home from his visit, he meets Ana Obregón, a smart girl in his SAT prep class. He immediately falls in love, but they never date. They grow to be good friends, but when her boyfriend Manny gets back from the Army, their relationship ends. Oscar gets into Rutgers, and he hopes that he will be able to turn his life around when he is in college. However, he quickly finds out that since he didn’t change anything about himself, life is still miserable and he is still a loser.

The story then turns to Lola’s past, and she narrates. Lola always felt controlled by her mother and then always made a point to find ways to be defiant, but after her mother Belicia is diagnosed with cancer, Lola feels powerless. To regain a feeling of power, she cuts off her hair and she runs away to be with her boyfriend Aldo, and she loses her virginity to him. She finds that living with Aldo and his father is not any better than her previous situation, and when she calls Oscar to meet with him, he brings the entire family. She is caught, and she is forced to go to Santo Domingo and live with La Inca. There, she is able to feel free and happy after awhile, and she joins the high school track team and starts dating someone. She also gets to learn about her family’s past, and this helps her to find some relief from the bruja feeling that she regularly encounters.

Yunior discusses the history of the de León family, starting with Belicia. La Inca took Beli in after having lived a terrible life with an adoptive family. La Inca strives to give her a better life than what she had experienced as a child, and sends her to a private school. Her behavior causes all the children to be afraid of her, and Beli makes no friends. However, when she becomes a teenager, she starts to develop a body that men go crazy for. She decides that she will use this as a way to attract attention from her crush Jack Pujols, and they have sex in a broom closet and get caught. It comes out that Pujols is already engaged to a girl from a wealthy family, and Beli is crushed when Pujols is sent to the army. Pujols was also closely connected to the Trujillo regime, placing her in a dangerous spot even if she didn’t realize it.

After that affair, she refuses to go to school and she gets a job as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant. Beli has a couple of men interested in her at that time, but she doesn’t get involved with either of them. Then, out dancing one night, Beli meets the Gangster, another person with direct contact to Trujillo and influence in his regime. She falls in love with him and becomes pregnant, but because the Gangster is married to Trujillo’s sister and Beli is only the mistress, the pregnancy causes his wife to take revenge by beating her near to death and causing a miscarriage. Nearly dead in the cane field she was beaten in, Beli sees a Mongoose with lion’s eyes and it leads her out to the road. When she gets well enough to travel, La Inca sends her to New York City, knowing that if Beli stays, she will most likely be killed by the Trujillos. On the airplane, she meets the man who will be the father of her children.

While at Rutgers, Oscar has tried to commit suicide, and Lola ask Yunior to look after him while at college, and he shares a dorm room with him. At first he has little interest in Oscar because he is far too busy with dating multiple women, but when his girlfriend dumps him over infidelity, he puts a lot of effort into helping Oscar. At first Oscar tries to work out and do what Yunior suggests so he can get fit and get a girlfriend, but because he is constantly made fun of, he quits. Yunior is angry and leaves Oscar alone. But then Oscar falls inlove with a Puerto Rican girl, and they start spending a lot of time together. But when she finds a boyfriend, she stops spending time with her. Oscar gets so angry that he rips things off her walls and yells at her for leaving him, and then he tries to commit suicide again by jumping off a bridge onto the freeway. However, he is saved by the same Golden Mongoose that his mother saw, and he hits the median of the road rather than the road itself. The next year, Yunior leaves, but after he starts dating Lola, he moves back in with Oscar for the Spring semester. Lola left Santo Domingo and in her pain over having to leave, broke contact with her boyfriend and all friends, slept with an older man for $2000, and then when her boyfriend died in an accident, gave the money to his family before she left.

Yunior then tells the story of Abelard Luis Cabral, Belicia’s father. He was a successful doctor, and he had two daughters with his wife. They are rich and socialize with the Trujillos. But when his oldest daughter Jacquelyn hits puberty and becomes a beautiful woman, Abelard worries that Trujillo will want to sleep with her, as he had done that with many other girls from prominent families. He decides they will stop going to parties and social occasions, at least leaving Jacquelyn behind. His wife, his mistress, and his friend all give their opinions, but he doesn’t act on them. Then, when Trujillo asks Abelard to bring Jacquelyn to a party and Abelard outright disobeys the order, Trujillo has Abelard arrested for speaking ill of him. Abelard is sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison, and it is there that he finds out that his wife is pregnant with another daughter. When Beli is born, her mother dies in an accident and she is adopted by her mother’s relatives, only to then be sent to be a slave to another family. Her two other sisters die mysteriously, and her father dies in prison. La Inca, Abelard’s sister, finds Beli living in a chicken coop with a horrible burn on her back, given to her when she disobeyed an order.

All of the de León family goes to visit La Inca in La Capital, and Oscar loves it. He stays a month longer than the rest of his family, and he falls in love with a prostitute. He is good friends with her but never gets to have sex with her, just like all his other relationships. Ybón, the prostitute, has a boyfriend, the head of the police force. When he gets pulled over with Ybón drunk in the car one night, Ybón kisses him in front of her boyfriend; he takes Oscar to a cane field and nearly beats him to death. When Oscar is healing, Ybón, who had been beaten as well, tells him that she will be marrying the Captain, and Beli books a flight for Oscar so he can get out of Santo Domingo. However, when Oscar gets back, he borrows money from Yunior and flies back to the Dominican Republic. He spends another month pursuing Ybón, and he also does research about his family and the Trujillos and writes a book about it. he sends the manuscript off before he is murdered in a cane field by the Captain’s men.

Yunior and Lola break up after Oscar dies, and within a year Beli also dies of cancer. Nearly a year after Oscar’s death, Lola receives a package. It contains a manuscript and a letter: the manuscript is a space opera, and the letter tells Lola that she should expect another manuscript in the mail that will detail how to rid the family of the fukú that forever haunts them. However, the package never arrives in the mail. For Yunior, the only bright note in the end of Oscar’s long and sad life is that he eventually sleeps with Ybón and finally gets the romantic relationship he always wanted before he died.

Brief Note on Themes
This work is a diasporic novel and a work of magical realism. Díaz mixes US pop culture with Latin American pop culture, creating a world that is mixed culturally and through genre: things that might happen only in the world of fiction and pop culture, such as the mongoose episodes, make their way into reality, blurring the line between reality and the mystical, a perfect example of magical realism. Díaz also explicitly references works such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is a work of magical realism. The characters in Díaz’s novel also parallel those in Márquez’s novel, with the children not being able to break free from the curses of the parents. Storytelling to rebuild the past plays a large part of the magical realism, as Yunior makes up events that he does not have information for. It also allows for a larger discussion of the terror of the Trujillo regime during its years of power in the Dominican Republic.

Human sexuality, particularly sexual roles in Dominican culture, runs throughout the book. Dominican men are supposed to be hypermasculine, sleeping with many women and being unfaithful to their wives, always having a mistress or another woman to run after. Trujillo, in a place of power, becomes the most virile Dominican man, sleeping with the most beautiful women in the country whenever he wants to. Women are then characterized as objects of sexual desire, but their sexuality is also a freeing power for them, as when they use their sexuality to defy the societal expectation and standard, they gain freedom and agency. Similarly, love and family life play a large part of this story: love for people seems to bring about the violence of the curse, and the two seem to regularly work against each other, although it might also be argued that it is the combination of the two things that leads to a zafa to ward off the family curse by the end of the novel.

The novel itself, representing diaspora, shows the embodiment of immigration: Belicia is the first generation, Beli doubly so because she is first placed in a school where she doesn’t fit in with the culture, and then again when she moves to New York City and must remake herself again. She is outside of her home country, and has escaped from death, and yet has lost a space to belong. Similarly, Oscar is an outsider because he does not fit cultural standards from either culture he belongs to, US or Dominican culture. He stands in a liminal space between cultures and also stands as an intermediary between family members, and he regularly fails at achieving any success in either sphere. Lola experiences similar troubles, especially as she is torn from the US, only to not long later be torn from the Dominican Republic, where she feels much more at home, back to the US, where she feels less connected to an identity or culture.

by bluesyjune