The vignette that stuck out the most to me was Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water in House on Mango Street. It stood out to me because of what we learned about Esperanza. While this chapter mainly introduces and sets up the new character of Elenita, I think that we gain a lot of insight into Esperanza’s character, her motivations, and what pushes her. She lives with her large family, as she has to because she is a young girl at this point. And while her family is something that is obviously very important to her, we also see her wanting distance. And we see Elenita trying to provide an immediate and less expensive solution for Esperanza, in finding her own home within herself. I think that this chapter is a good look into the formative years of Esperanza’s life. In the previous chapter, when her grandfather died, Esperanza was forced to mature fast and take over her father’s part in the leadership role. While she is mature enough for that Esperanza is having a harder time being able to understand her emotions enough to create a space within her own heart, like Elenita is trying to advise her to, where she can go to just be her..
Eoin Riley-Duffy
The vignette that stood out the most to me was Hairs by Sandra Cisneros. At first look, it seems like a very simple and straightforward in its meaning. I think that at first glance it is just a brief description of the different hairstyles of the people in her family. However, I believe that Sandra Cisneros uses hairstyles to show how they are all different and connected simultaneously. She describes the feel and looks of everyone’s hair. To me, this is representing their individuality within the family. These vignettes focus on this family as a unit. Everyone together. but she describes how their roles within the family make them different and stand out from the others. And Hairs is the most recent example of how they stand out. In this vignette, the most important person is the mother. Her hair is given emphasis in the story. I think that to Sandra Cisneros and to the rest of the family, the mother’s hair is representing the safety that they feel with her. It smells comforting and reminds them of home.
One thing that strikes me as relevant from Bettelheim’s Fear of Fantasy to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs By Anne Sexton’s poem is the nativity and broad imagination of young adults and children. Bettelheim’s in-depth analysis of child psychology goes into the openness of their imagination. How children will accept what you tell them as true and believe in it wholeheartedly. Whereas adults, as they get older, become more jaded and less inclined to believe things. This innocence of the child mind is shown in Snow White. As shown in the poem, when she manages to escape and live with the dwarfs, they tell her to not leave the house and only to trust them. However, when her step-mother tracks her down, she disguises herself on numerous occasions to try to kill Snow White and every time, Snow White falls for her tricks. Just like in Bettelheim’s analysis, Snow White has a very open mind and is accepting of new ideas,
In my opinion, I agree with the perspective that it is an inverted fairytale. In a stereotypical fairytale, there is usually some kind of princess who needs to be saved by some kind of prince, knight, or mysterious man. Then he takes her away, they fall in love, they ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after. The story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” has similar components with a very different outcomes. This story’s princess, Connie, while feels isolated from her family and misunderstood, she does not want to be with them. However, she does not want to be taken from them. Especially not by Arnold Friend. In this case, Arnold Friend is the “savior: He is the mysterious dark fiure that is going to take Connie away. Except in this story, they aren’t in love and he is taking her by force. And they don’t end up happily ever after.
In the article How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch in order to “complete” what the poem has started, you must put yourself in the poem. You have to immerse yourself into the poem, and put yourself into the point of view of the narrative. The article brings up the fact that it is something that takes time and effort to get used to. But over time it should make understanding poems easier. The poem I chose was The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B Yeats. This narrator is fantasizing about going to a remote island off the coast of Ireland. In this poem, the narrator wishes to live a simple life on a remote island. The narrator says that the nature on the island will bring peace and comfort. “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings” (5-8, Hirsch). The narrator speaks about nature on the island like it has a spiritual meaning and as if it is a part of him.
One way my knowledge and understanding of poetry has been broadened by all of this week’s reading was by figuring out how to actually read a poem. One thing that was hard for me, especially with reading older poems, was knowing where the lines ended. After reading the article “How to Read a Poem”, it advised to read it out loud. Normally this isn’t something that I would do, but I was already having some trouble decoding the Shakespeare poems. When reading it out loud I found that I was naturally making stops. This made it make more sense to me, it allowed me to take more time to read it, and the natural stops made the line stops make sense to me. Also, since I was reading out loud, I was forced to slow down and that made the poem more digestible for me and help with my analysis of what was being said.
I am focusing my research essay on “Araby” by James Joyce. My thesis statement is that this story shows how people’s ideas of love are warped by what they see around them. This is shown by the relationship that the main character’s aunt and uncle have with each other and how this changes his mindset on what a loving relationship looks like. I am using a biographical paper to back up my research paper and as my secondary subject. I am talking about how the examples of relationships that people see in their lives set up the foundation of what they think relationships should look like. So I want to look at James Joyce’s life and his parents to actually examine what he say and how it affected him. I want to see if I notice bits from his life that made their way into his work and shows how his parent’s relationship affected his own ideas.
Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Wife” and Kate Chopin’s short story “Story of an Hour” have two main characters that feel very similar. Both of these texts are centered around women whose lives are defined by being married and neither one of them like it. The “Story of an Hour”‘s main character Mrs. Mallard’s husband just died, and she comes to the realization that while she might have felt sad at first, she was then overwhelmed with this feeling this she could finally be free. Be free to be her own person. She had been forced to sacrifice a good part of her life just to be her husband’s wife. She wasn’t allowed to be her own individual. This is very similar to the theme of “The Wife”. There the reverse is happening. A woman is being forced to set aside her own life, and her own identity for a man’s. Emily Dickinson writes, “It lay unmentioned, as the sea Develops pearl and weed” (Dickinson). Here, she is describing how the wife in the poem is going to have to lay aside all of her ambitions, her personal life, and her own interests now that she is married.
I think the interior of this story, like many ancient Greek stories, has its core rooted in the idea of fate. The story, “A Good Man is Hard To Find” is about a family that ends up being murdered on their way to vacation in Florida. However, the grandmother of this family leads them down the path, quite literally, that leads them to their murder. She is obsessed with the idea of dying, especially since she is close to death. She tries to avoid it, as most of us would, but she takes it to a different level with how all-consuming it is for her. She plans what she is going to wear in case she is found dead in it. And she wants to take unnecessary extra precautions to try to push death away as much as possible. However, it is proven to be unavoidable. The route she takes her family downs leads to their death, and she is unable to talk the murderer out of it. No matter what she did she couldn’t avoid it. Much like Odysseus, she couldn’t fight her fate.
Oedipus the King is a story about a Greek king who ends up killing his father and marrying his mother, even though he does everything he can to avoid doing that very thing. Even though it is set in Ancient Greece, there are timeless human experiences that people from today still can relate to. For instance, Oedipus ignores everything that points him to the truth about his life. He is so blinded to it. People around him are telling him things he doesn’t want to hear, so he simply doesn’t listen and remains ignorant. This is something that people can relate to. People constantly try to deny things that might be true because accepting the truth is too hard for them. Another relatable moment in the play is the fear that the chorus experiences. They represent the average citizen who has to live in the city but doesn’t have any real control over what is going on. They can only watch and hear about what is happening. People, especially recently, can relate to this. With scary events going on around the world, and with politicians not seeming to do a lot to change it, I know that people feel like the only thing they can do is sit and watch.
“I am stretched on the rack of doubt, and terror and trembling hold my heart, O Delian Healer, and I worship full of fears for what doom you will bring to pass, new or renewed in the revolving years. Speak to me, immortal voice, child of golden Hope” (Grene, 3 182-188). This is passage is from the very beginning of the play. The chorus represents the citizens, the average onlookers, who aren’t playing a major role, just only able to watch. So right now, they are very anxious, stressed, and filled with overwhelming fear because their home is in ruins and there is nothing they can do about it but watch. In this passage, they show their fear through their creative language. The chorus describes how their fear “holds my heart”. This language allows the listener to see how these feelings are taking over their whole being. How they are all consumed in their fear. The chorus is also showing their faith in this verse. Even though they are scared, they still are praying. They refer to Apollo, by calling him the “Delian Healer” and the “child of Golden Hope”. Showing how he is their savior, their end to this suffering, much like the raising sun is to the night.
“Araby” by James Joyce is not a love story. It is a story about a boy who is growing up and his fascination and obsession with his friend’s older sister. He speaks to her hardly ever in the story. The main interaction that the two of them share is when she talks about the Dublin bazaar that is happening that she wants to attend but can’t because of her school. The main character finally comes to terms with the fact that she is talking to him, he lies and says that he was planning on going and will get something for her. The only other times he says her is when she calls her brother in for dinner. Or when he would watch her from afar. There is no real connection between the two of them. He watches her and follows her around time. He thinks about her and how he would approach her as a way to escape from the monotonous day-to-day of his school work and home life with his Aunt and Uncle. This is the story of a young boy’s obsessive crush, not one of two people in love.
The characters I want to focus on are Mercedes and Sylvia. Mercedes is a very clear outlier to all the children in this story. Everyone else had some sort of reaction to the toy store. Every other child was in some state of disbelief. She was the only one that walked in and was not shocked by the amount of money that all the toys cost. She treated it like it was something that she was used to seeing, that was normal to her. Mercedes seems to know more about the items than the other children like she knows what the paper weight does. Her main response to the whole experience was when she casually mentioned she wanted to come again when she got birthday money. Now Sylvia had the complete opposite response. Her was one of shock and more anger. She seems to almost understand the point that Miss Moore is trying to show her, but Sylvia is having a hard time accepting it. It angers her that other people get to have these extremely expensive toys, and have the money to so causally spend 1,000 dollars on a sailboat. I’m sure that it is also worse that one of her classmates gets to have this kind of life and Sylvia doesn’t.
The young Langston Hughes is different than he was at the beginning of the story because he now lacks this belief in God, Jesus, and religion. At the beginning of this short story, he is looking forward to accepting God and Jesus in his life. He trusted the grown-ups in his life. He trusted them whole heartily that Jesus would come and save him because he was told by his family and other adults that this would happen. He had no reason not to believe them at this point. Then he waits and waits to see this light, to see Jesus come to him, and he watches as all the other children leave him. It then gets to this point where he accepts the fact that Jesus isn’t going to come to him in this way. By the end, he no longer has this religious belief anymore. Also, by the end, the young Langston Hughes would sure doubt his family and other adults and not accept whatever they said as fact and truth because now he has trusted them and they have seemed to lie. I would also think that he would have doubt and shame in himself. Maybe there was something wrong and different with him and that’s why Jesus didn’t come to him.
