Final Paper

When I signed up for this course, I was expecting famous authors such as Hemingway or Faulkner or at least something more modern like Albert Camus but the first day of class surprised me. I did not consider any of the assigned books to be literature; in fact I thought the exact opposite. I learned that I hate Eve Ensler but also that there are many female authors that are often overlooked. I remember on the first day of class you asked us all to name some women who have written pieces of literature and only a few us could name a handful of names one being J.K. Rowling. I never noticed this in bookstores and libraries but it does seem that men have written more of the most famous novels, poems, etc. I have to admit some of the books we read cannot compare to Joyce or Homer but at the same time some of them did have their moments that prove me wrong.

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez was written very well. I remember the first time I read As I Lay Dying when I was thirteen was the first time I ever thought a novel sounded beautiful. William Faulkner’s style was graceful and intimate with great description and spontaneity. In the Time of Butterflies was a breath of fresh air from the previous novels we had read. I liked how she alternated the narrators (just like As I Lay Dying) and the way she expressed the tension in the characters lives through both militant and feminine voices. Some of the stories in Krik? Kriak! were written very well too. Danticat described both the beautiful and the impoverished parts of the Dominican Republic perfectly. I could see the exact colors of the flowers or how dim or bright the light is in her surroundings. Fun Home does not need much visual expression but even though it did not read chronologically, her writing flowed well enough so that her adult and childlike thoughts flowed together seamlessly.

Our discussions did not revolve around style and syntax much but the books we read involved a lot of character description. All books involve some sort of pain to trigger a transformation or change in the end but the books we read were more violent. In Push, In the Time of the Butterflies, some of the poems in 19 Varieties of Gazelle, One or Two Things I Know for Sure, and more, women were sexually assaulted and/or beaten. There is only one reaction to rape but the only way our discussions were not repetitive is by the degree of rape and also the character’s strength. Precious in Push, had been tortured in every possible way since she was a baby but because of her upbringing and built in anger, she grew up and forgave her enemies in a matter of years. In When the Emperor was Divine, the woman was never personally assaulted but being trapped in the confines of an internment camp while worrying about the safety of her disconnected family tortured her for years. Every character is different even though their stories can have some common themes but overall women express mutual ideas.

Women and girls define themselves by instinct. We are meant to be mothers and protectors therefore celebrating family, lamenting abuse, and venting our regrets and anger. The past and our ancestors are also very important. In Two of Three Things I Know for Sure, Allison describes her mother, aunts, and grandmothers as homely working class women who become tired and aged by the time they are in their late twenties. However, no matter what class or the amount of affection among family and friends, platonic and romantic love helps define women. Education is what separates us from the expected housewife or statistic and encourages women to grow past or expectations. All at the same time, staying beautiful and feminine with a confident glow gives women a leg up to progress through any adversities in order to ultimately express poise and triumph.

Let Me Tell You a Story

In a book about her premature journey into adulthood, Dorothy Allison vents her frustrations and disturbed thoughts in order to share her pain and find closure by writing this book. On a personal level, Allison needed to release her anger to the world. She was physically and sexually abused up to her teen years and degraded by her family in a desolate part of Greenville. All of her ancestors, men and women were laborers with calloused hands and tired bodies. Her mother, grandmother, aunts, etc… were just as everyone expected them to be: homely, tired, broken mothers. It was as if they were born defeated with no hope of escaping the life they inherited. It is almost hard to believe that Allison left and avoided her doomed fate. Other than that, she publicized her story knowing that there are other broken women that can relate to her experiences. At one point in the book she even says, “…to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the sure way to touch the heart and change the world.” She grew up to become a feminist activist in any way she could from enrolling into an all male karate class to just dressing and acting differently. Although she is an activist for women’s rights, she is a lesbian because she fell in love with a woman (which she tells her sister on page 53) which is one of her many abilities to find and express herself realistically. She says, “I would rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.” When most people hear feminist lesbian, they think of a butch, man-hating woman but that is not Allison. She worked for women’s rights while avoiding her family’s failures and cruel stereotypes by experiencing and finding the world. Allison loves to tell stories and, “I can tell you anything. All you have to believe is the truth.”

99% Americans

Discrimination has been prevalent since the beginning of American history but what makes the segregation of the Japanese Americans during World War II so shameful is that the people in these camps were completely Americanized. In the beginning of the book when the author was describing the woman, I imagined the housewife in an old sitcom from the 1940’s and 1950’s who always wore pearls and high heels while working around the house stopping only to give her husband a peck on the cheek when he came home from work saying, “Honey, I’m home!” Also, I imagined that they celebrated the Fourth of July at their neighbor’s barbeque and drove a Ford. The family most likely didn’t speak a lot of Japanese around the house and did not have Japanese accents but even though they did still connect with their roots by having statues of Buddha, kimonos, and other pieces of Japanese culture around the house, they could have been considered an average American family if it weren’t for their ancestry.

While on the train and in the stables and into the camps, everyone was speaking English and only some older people would only speak Japanese. This was what made it especially shameful because chances are that they had emigrated here about twenty years before. If there were more young people who only spoke Japanese, there would be more of a chance that they would be disloyal but there weren’t. The boy played cowboys and Indians and fantasized about horses while looking out into the desert and the girl liked American candy and music and also actress, Dorothy Lamour. However, when they went into the camps, they lost their identity and dignity. They lived with the bare essentials and a few personal belongings but other than that had nothing but their regrets and false sense of guilt looming over them.

Abdul

As an adult, Abdul will not have the emotional and physical scars that Precious had and will supercede his parents. He did not grow up in a child-friendly environment and was not always perfectly cared for for the first few years of his life but he will not have as many mental road blocks that Precious had as a result of constant abuse and terrorization which kept her from living up to her dreams.  One day Abdul will know the truth about who his father is and will be forced to experience his mother’s death at a very young age but at that point, Precious will have most likely pushed him through school with exceptional grades and he will have more than his parents and grandparents ever had. However, if it weren’t for the Each One Teach One program that Precious attended, she would not have the same attitude about life and, as a result, restricted Abdul’s chance of escaping from a lineage of abuse. Instead of having Precious’ full attention and expectations, Abdul would only have been used to collect welfare and would probably experience everything Precious did as a child, including his father/grandfather’s abuse. After thinking this life was normal, he would continue being illiterate and would be another statistic that slipped through the cracks in Harlem. Precious is now smart enough to protect him from everything she experienced and her pride and happiness will help him succeed in life and inspire him to do anything he dreams.

Where would she be?

The language in Push showed signs of Precious’ illiteracy even before she mentioned that all of the pages in her math book looked the same. Most of the words were spelled incorrectly and grammatical errors were ubiquitous. In the beginning, her anger which was heavily emphasized by profanity, was not just a result of her troubles at home but also the frustration of being trapped and surrounded by a world of failure.

The pregnancy of her second child, although a result of rape, resulting in expulsion from school actually saved her. She recognized that she was overweight and compared herself to her morbidly obese mother whom she estimated to be at least three hundred pounds. She resented her mother for being ignorant and cruel and Precious saw herself in her mother if she did not change something now. Precious would be living with her mother while being beaten and raped every night resulting in more pregnancies while on welfare until someone would unfortunately die if she did not leave and start her own life.

Precious was a sixteen-year-old eighth grader who did not have many friends and despite her intimidating façade, was scared and self-conscious to the point of incontinency (as a child). Her defiant attitude towards school and the Teach One Each One program almost kept her from meeting Ms. Rain and her classmates but after Ms. Rain’s calloused method of teaching leveled Precious’ bullying, she was tamed into wanting to go to school and write in her journal. Eventually, after learning to read and write she sees the new students with the same insolent mind-set she once had and for the first time in the book, was happy and enthusiastic because she tested as reading and writing at an eighth grade level.

Deprived or Delighted?

The pictures in Fun Home depict Alison’s parents as angry and depressed with a touch of defeat. Although her father was already having homosexual affairs in Germany, he and Alison’s mother were starry-eyed and completely in love. Bruce wrote multiple love letters that Alison compared to famous authors. They would have occasional fights as all couples do but other than that living in Germany with the love of each other’s lives seemed like a utopia.

However, at the same time as Alison’s mother became pregnant Bruce’s father dies and is forced to transform from romantic soldier in Europe to funeral director with three children in a mundane town in Pennsylvania. The dream was over. Alison’s parents needed to find ways to replace the happiness they once had but nothing could replace what they once had. I am not sure what having kids is like but from Alison’s depiction of her parents emotions draws me to the conclusion that it cannot always compare to the romantic years in a distant country.

Conversely, Alison’s childhood was not as disturbed or traumatizing as most people would expect if they hadn’t read the book. She does mention that her family was not as physically affectionate as other families and that her surroundings were either morbid or a beautiful cover up for the ugly truth (for example an old house or sexual taboos), but she was a happy child with friends and hobbies. Her homosexuality was apparent at a very young age but wanting to wear plaid shirts and manly boots is not related to radiating depression around her. In the first panels she plays airplane with her father and he teaches her to swim in the last panels; whether her father is faking this playful image or he is genuinely having fun with his only daughter, Alison was not deprived or disturbed as a child.

Dark Humor

 

Although Fun Home is a tragic yet stirring novel, Alison Bechdel presents it comfortably using her own humor to express how she has come to terms with the misfortunes she has encountered in her youth. The title of the book, for example, shortening a very morbid word into a word to describe joy and amusement shows how she has accepted the concept of death. Even though she has grown up around funerals, seen cadavers, and experienced the loss of an immediate family member at a young age, you would think it would still be as unnerving to hear jokes about death as it is for everyone else. In several instances, Alison laughs or smiles during some of these moments like when she first arrives home for her father’s funeral and she sees her brother they both smirk at each other as if their father did something only mildly reckless like fall off a ladder while painting the house. However even in the midst of her ignorance, she would make cynical remarks or be sarcastic. For instance, when she sees her father leaving for a town known for its mental institution, she teases him only to find out he really is going to a therapist.

This dark playfulness could also be stemmed from her mother’s constant negativity or a mixture of that and her innocence. Her mother always had a depressing one liner to every question. When she, Alison, and her brothers watch their grown uncle move into a trailer next door to their parents house her mother says, “After you graduate, I never want to see you again.” Although it was a joke, it is something that, if taken out of context, would sound like she is more than ready to abandon her young children. Through all she had gone through in her childhood, which would probably force most people into years of therapy, her jokes helped her cope with her awkward childhood, disintegrating family, and sexual confusion as a young woman and also used it as a method of healing, not an extension of any remaining anger or depression.

Icarus and Daedalus

Alison’s relationship with her father, although very atypical and seemingly destructive, was very loving. She grew up in a very morbid setting with dark family secrets she was not even aware of until her college years. Her father’s repressed homosexuality stirred trouble everywhere around him. After cheating and fooling around with young boys, he lost his job, his wife’s trust and sanity, and almost went to jail. Alison’s parents projected their anger towards her and her brothers leaving them confused and distant. She had witnessed her parents show affection to each other on only two occasions but other than that her parents kept busy away from each other through their own facades – acting and restoring a dirty, old house. Alison and her father were eventually desensitized to everything that should have upset them and both had a strange habit of fishing for sympathetic or shocked reactions that they wish they could feel.

The theme of this book was not necessarily homosexuality itself. Instead, she uses that as a main example of how much she and her father loved each other. She always found comfort in knowing that they were so similar. He and Alison never had solid conversations but they connected when her father recommended books and then discussed literature in school and at home. She wondered if the picture she found of him in women’s clothes was taken the same way her girlfriend took a picture of her on her twenty-first birthday. Even though she describes him as the driving force of chaos in her household, compares their relationship to Icarus and his father, she says that paternity is very important and that “…he was there to catch me when I leapt.”

Maria Teresa

On page 30, Maria Teresa begins her own story in 1945. She just had her First Communion and Minerva gave her a diary. She was very excited that everyone, except Papa, came to see her and that she got to new shoes with heels, which made her feel very grownup. Maria Teresa is very active in the church and often ruminates on god and the meaning of a soul. She comes home from school for the holidays but before she goes back, she celebrates Benefactor’s Day and is just as thrilled to attend a party with Trujillo as she was at her past religious ceremonies.

Shortly after returning to school, Maria becomes aware of Minerva’s involvement in supporting the regime uprising. She had always thought El Jefe was a glorious leader but she is terrified when Minerva and her atheist friend Hilda open her eyes not just by their theories or Hilda’s pamphlets but also the fact that Hilda disappeared and when guards come to the convent looking for her. At the end of the chapter, Hilda is caught by the guards and Minerva forces Maria to bury her diary in fear that the guards would find it.

Later, Papa is dead and Minerva buys her a new diary to relieve stress and get things off her chest. Maria has a reoccurring dream about her father and a wedding dress, which makes her very uneasy for the next few years. She then writes a letter to Trujillo with her mother to inform him of her father’s death. Also, after some altercations between Minerva and Trujillo, Maria wrote a speech for her in order for Trujillo to allow her into the University. She then graduates and attends the University with Minerva. Soon Maria doubts her desire to become a lawyer but Minerva pushes her to keep going even though later, Minerva graduates with a law degree but cannot get the license to practice. Instead, Minerva marries a man she met at school and has a baby.

One night, while Maria is staying with Minerva and her husband, she finds out that they are active members of a national underground and instantly knows she wants to join. She is now Mariposa #2, fighting for the rebellion. At the same time, she meets Leandro, who is also part of the rebellion, and they get married.

Human Heros

Trujillo murdered hundreds of thousands of people, ruled the Dominican Republic for decades, and was compared to God in textbooks and mottos. He is a legend that doesn’t need any more embellishments but Alvarez invents these characters that could be mistaken as historical figures. Nothing is too romantic and no character is completely Herculean which is why this book has the perfect combination of fiction and fact. She could have led the characters in a straight line from growing teen to insurgent but instead she lets her characters remain women while they journey through the rebellion. The sisters find husbands, have children, and approach the same problems as the common woman does but at the same time they strive for the goal of bringing down Trujillo. For example, even in the first few chapters when they are aspiring to become nuns but in the end become political radicals shows not only the broad spectrum of talent and intelligence that merits a novel but also allows the characters to go through a metamorphosis which is closer to real life than something like a birth rite.

At the same time, people do not often write about ordinary people who do nothing. Alvarez took an extraordinary story and imagined Trujillo’s mistresses’ friends, his guard’s victim’s family, or any other nth degree of separation that everyone could have easily forgotten then twisted a woman, like a strand of ivy, around the tension of his reign. The ordinary characters in extraordinary situations are incredulous but Alvarez exemplifies believable femininity and strength through timing and real life parallels.

Why did she write this?

After reading In the Time of the Butterflies, I realized that this is a very significant story especially since it is based on true events. It displays a powerful message of women struggling to find a way during political turmoil. Dominican history is not a popular subject in America and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo is not as common or well known as Thomas Jefferson here either. An astounding string of events like in this book goes overlooked but Julia Alvarez takes advantage of this to trigger American’s awareness of oppression and tragedies in the Dominican Republic under the reign of Trujillo.

Alvarez’s use of female characters took it into a deeper and more specific level, showing not only how women were affected under these conditions but also that women can be powerful enough to fight back too. She displays women as complex and emotionally versatile. For example, although some of these girls aspire to be powerful and successful they also gossip with friends and talk about having children and getting married. Therefore, not only was this written in order to share an incredible story but also to show that women can be influential figures who fight communism and corrupt dictators.

What about the boys?

In EC, Eve Ensler ignored the fact that growing girls are not the only people in pain. She talks about body image, sex, pregnancy, etc… but she wrote this book as if these problems do not happen as frequently, if at all, to boys of the same age. Even the title of the book is too specific to young girls. Teenage boys worry just as much as girls do even though some of their issues maybe different, overall they can be very similar. While girls feel pressured to be skinny and have bigger breasts, boys fret over being muscular and developing larger than their friends. Girls don’t want to be called sluts but boys are terrified of being called gay. She writes about adults’ impressions on teenagers but often implies that the boys are the ones that grow up and become the adult that judges and misleads the girls. In “You Tell Me How to be a Girl in 2010”, she rants about the many disasters in the world like war, environmental destruction, etc which is the result of the “authoritarian maniacs” “premiers, czars, and presidents” who all happen to be men. In the first two lines she writes, “Questions, doubt, ambiguity, and dissent have somehow become very unmasculine” as if it is a fact women are unable to make a difference. “What Don’t You Like About Being a Girl?” reinforces her writing. “Girls can’t control anything, Boys can do anything they want…People thinking you are weak…Girls can’t work even though, they are educated.” This is a stereotype that can be avoided but when it is reinforced by every feminist writer, it will continue for every generation of teenagers. Its easy to make a collection of stories to bolster a radical point but letting the reader develop their own opinion of feminism in a young girls life shows true talent.

Is EC a deviation or continuation of VM?

I am an Emotional Creature is definitely an extension of The Vagina Monologues with the exception that Eve Ensler focuses solely on teenage girls as opposed to women of all ages in The Vagina Monologues. The two books were very similar in that she confronts insecurities, abuse, and women’s sexuality however, I am an Emotional Creature is set in a different stage of life. For example, when the girls in I am an Emotional Creature talk about sex, it’s more about exploring what it is, how to use birth control, and understanding the risks of STD’s and unplanned pregnancies. The women in The Vagina Monologues talk about sex using what they’ve learned, what they like or don’t like, and their specific experiences over obviously longer periods of time. On page 50 of I am an Emotional Creature, a girl writes “Things I Heard About Sex” where she is constantly contradicting herself as if she has been taught so many things about sex but she is still naïve to the topic but the women in Monologues give solid answers when asked questions about pleasure. In Emotional Creature, two girls are at a sleepover and one wants to play would you rather but the other girl is uncomfortable when asked questions about dating, STD’s, and social stigmas just like when Ensler would push women out of their comfort zone in Monologues. Also, in Monologues, Ensler talks about violence against women all over the world involving rape and prostitution then continues in Emotional Creature with sex trafficking and abusive men. This is evident on pages 71-80 and 97-101 where are girl writes to Rhianna but empathizes with Chris Brown, another girl describes sex trafficking, and another girl explains the rules of how to handle this unwanted soliciting.

Vaginas

In The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler emphasizes women’s’ empowerment and feminism and takes advantage of society’s perspective on the female form. Even today the word “vagina” is more difficult to say or think about than the word “penis”. For example, starting on page 25, Ensler interviews a woman that was so hesitant to tell her story of embarrassing bodily functions, strange dreams, and eventually cancer that at the end she says, “You happy? You made me talk…You got an old lady to talk about her down-there.” She purposely makes us uncomfortable but in this case, it is the only way to capture an audience to address these pressing issues. There is a social modesty that she confronts to not only celebrate femininity but also to identify that there is a brick wall between modesty and reality.

Although Ensler wants to help, and does help, women be proud of the secret they keep between their legs, she works hard to help Bosnian women, the homeless, any woman in need as well, however, The Vagina Monologues focused more on the emotional aspects of talking about menstruation instead of victims of sexual and violent crimes. She didn’t balance the two and the way she organized the interviews and her experiences made the book lean towards meaningful sex and embarrassing stories about puberty.

I cannot relate to this book. I am not as liberal as she is in that I do not feel a need to take workshops or personifying a sexual organ. I agree with very few of her liberating ideas but her work with sexually and physically abused women was a vital topic to address and should not be left in humor’s shadow.

Night Women

“Night Women” is a story of a young woman who does whatever it takes to take care of her son even if it means prostitution. She works in close vicinity to her son’s bed but there is no other choice. The, “…innocent fabric that splits our one-room house into two spaces, two mats, two worlds” is not just a matter of a very short distance between her and her son but also the impassable line between her own personal hell and the good times she used to have with her husband and son without strange men she finds on the streets. Ironically, one of her clients gave him a radio to deafen the sounds coming from the other side of the fabric and he is given the scarf she uses during the day to sleep with as if it is a security blanket.

She notices that as he sleeps, a firefly approaches him as if it is a light to show him the way out of there but it avoids her as if there is no chance. Then she worries if that firefly is actually a blood sucking mosquito that leaves marks on his face, “as though he had spent the whole night kissing a woman with wide-open flesh wounds on her face” – just like her. She uses the butterfly metaphor to describe him as delicate and vulnerable in a very dangerous world he still has not figured out yet.

Her guilt is overwhelming her more and more everyday like a dam that is about to burst. She knows he will find our what she does soon. She lies already that the men he has walked in on were just a dream and that she wears make up at night because she is expecting divine symbols who expect her to be attractive. Her life is like her job: beautiful on the outside but empty and dark on the inside.

Missing Peace

In the couple of days that this story takes place, Lamort is confronted with issues she has been plague by her entire life. The theme of posterity is evident throughout the story. Lamort’s mother died while giving birth to her but her grandmother resents her for it and when Emilie is introduced, not as a typical journalist, but a writer for posterity, her grandmother seems to find it irrelevant and trivial. Lamort asked her grandmother what she said to Emilie and she responded, “That I already have posterity. I was once a baby and now I am an old woman. That is posterity.” Her grandmother may think it is a trifling issue or something that should be ignored, but to Lamort and Emilie who are both looking for something of their deceased mothers, posterity is all that matters. This makes a womanly bond between Lamort and Emilie. Emilie points out that, “they say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother…you, child, were born a woman.” Lamort could have found this by becoming a mother just in the beginning with Raymond but she would not have found (the missing…) peace. This is evident in the first few pages when Raymond says, “I know I can make you feel like a woman…so why don’t you let me?” but Lamort responds, “My grandmother says I can have babies”. He then has her remember the password so she could trust him as if they were a man and a woman but the password “peace” changes leaving Lamort to become a woman for herself.

After the confrontation with Toto and Raymond, Lamort and Emilie walk home disappointed. Emilie wants to write down their names but Lamort reluctantly quotes her grandmother, “’Wehave already had posterity,’ I said. ‘When?’ ‘We were babies and we grew old.’” The next morning, after Lamort gives her Toto and Raymond’s names, Emilie writes them down on the back of a photo of her mother and gives it to her – “…for posterity”. This photo, which is the physical form of posterity in the story, finally gives Lamort the strength to confront her grandmother and have her change her name from Lamort, to her mother’s, Marie Magdalene.

Jerusalem

Naomii Shihab Nye is obviously very anti-war. She knows that it doesn’t matter who was there first or who was oppressed more. She is talking not only about how nonsensical war is but also how infectious it can be. Her father has a scar from his childhood because a friend threw a rock at him instead of at a bird. The violence made a soft spot that could not filled but…“the boy who has fallen stands up”. When she wrote, “Soldiers stalk a pharmacy:/big guns, little pills/If you tilt your head just slightly it’s ridiculous” she means that you don’t have to change your perspective to see how unreasonable people are being. It doesn’t matter what is happening now as much as ending all the violence now. In my opinion, this poem is a little bit hypocritical because she says “A child’s poem says,/’I don’t like wars,/ they end up with monuments’….Why are we so monumentally slow?...It’s late but everything comes next.” She wants things to change but she herself is not actively doing anything. She is the child in that verse but children can’t end wars they just complain about them. However, every writers writes for a reason and she obviously has very strong opinions on this topic to spread it through a whole book of poems.