Academic Writing
Essay # 7; 2024
Ghosts hide in the crevices of objects we hang onto. These ghosts aren’t necessarily the phantoms of people, but rather, ghosts of who we used to be, want to be, or who we’ve become. They haunt us by a coded set of value systems that we’ve managed to interpret from the many dimensions these objects present. This concept is not singularly related to gender or class alone; however, we’re going to look at three women who are haunted by the possession of jewelry. In Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 story, “The Necklace,” Mathilde urgently demands participation in a heightened class that she feels disenfranchised from. When she is invited to a ball that will be frequented by high ranking socialites, Mathilde borrows a diamond necklace allowing her to masquerade as a rich and charming woman, heretofore when she loses the necklace, ten years of hard labor are needed to pay for its replacement. To say that the diamond necklace shines with beauty and grace is an oversimplification; the diamond necklace is fake just like the hollow appearance of upward mobility and status. Similarly, Loretta and Karen in Laura Maffei’s “The Bracelet,” are haunted by their value systems. Loretta is robbed of her inherited mother’s charm bracelet which she unexpectedly sees dangling from the wrist of Karen in a Staten Island checkout line. Maffei employs a dual perspective, gleaning an insight that Karen’s abusive husband bought the pawned-off charm bracelet as an apology for an aggressive outburst. Shattering an otherwise outward appearance of graceful constraint, a threatened Karen, screams in agony that leaves a bewildered Loretta to acquiesce. Each one of these middle class married women sculpts their value system and self-worth from the haunted jewelry: For Mathilde, the necklace augments her materialistic vanity so that she can promote a wealthier version of herself, Loretta memorializes her mother in the bracelet, and with that very same bracelet Karen hides behind it as a shield where she finds safety from her husband’s abuse. Despite legitimate claims for ownership, Loretta is the most deserving of her bracelet, not only because it’s predicated as her possession, but because she doesn’t wield it under worrisome pretenses.
Mathilde has an insatiable and entitled position when it comes social status. She is not only haunted by her own homely furniture and husbands profession, but by luxury seen at the expense of other people. She reduces her marriage, modesty and middle class station as, “a mistake of destiny” (Maupassant 591). Her materialism is generated from the results of her efforts, not built entirely on her desire to have them. A victim to her own narcissism, she is immersed in a self-induced feeling of considerable opposition from a class she was never meant to have access to. 19th century France has conditioned her to understand this. In other words, she inputs her materialistic impulses like a formula into a calculator hoping for easy solutions. For Mathilde, it’s never entirely about attaining the luxuries she craves, but about how she is perceived by other rich women. She is shallow in her evaluation that, “There’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich” (Maupassant 593). This is an important infinitive verbiage in “to look” as it implies how obsessed Mathilde is with how she is perceived. She borrows only the finest necklace (after discarding plenty) from her friend to wear to a party. Her becoming, “lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself” is indicative of how she looks more than how she feels. The necklace empowers her, but it is the idea of the necklace and its display around her neck that she finds so enchanting (as do other admirers) (Maupassant 593). At this point, we should address how the necklace that delivered her this brief salvation, the necklace that, once lost, results in ten laborious years of poverty, was in fact made of paste and not true diamond. This is a catastrophic chip away at the hollow façade that is luxury and presentable wealth. It’s all artificial sweetener; fake and sickly. Created and embraced by those who value their appearance more than being authentic. Remember, in 19th century France, most wealth was generated by inheritance. Looking for a cab after the party, Mathilde feels embarrassed at the wraps her husband brought for her, “wraps of common life, whose poverty contrasted with the elegance of the ball dress” (Maupassant 593-594). Her value system that the necklace established is threatened the instant she returns to her old life. The ghost is symbolically strangling her neck, and she will forever feel the shadow of that squeeze. Her destiny is inevitable: whether she lost the necklace or not, she will always crave another. Not unlike a heroin junkie, she’ll need another fix. Her insatiable appetite will never be satisfied, thus she questions fate apropos its disappearance, “What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace?” establishing that the necklace will always haunt her (Maupassant 596). The ghost of who she wishes she could be is within that necklace and it cost her almost everything.
Loretta is haunted by another set of value systems placed on jewelry; one of considerable emotional value. This is the value of remembrance. The charm bracelet is an artifact of a mother who died too soon, but not before greatly impacting who Loretta is as a person. She earnestly safeguards the bracelet as a relic; as a reminder. Unlike Mathilde, she does not profit from its beauty, but simply “kept it in a little heap in her velveteen lined jewelry box” (Maffei 1). She doesn’t posture as someone she’s not, but at the same time, cannot part with it because she invests great value on it. They are oxidized together; a modifier to Loretta’s efforts to cling to her mother. It is the ghost of her mother that she preserves and it is for this reason that she tries so desperately to claim it back from Karen. Perhaps, she hasn’t buried her mother the way she means to? If so, she doesn’t do this in a particularly unhealthy way. Loretta innocently creates reasons not to sell the bracelet, despite the behest of her husband, saying, “Her mother would not have wanted her to sell it” (Maffei 1). She is protective over her shared history with her mother and sisters; endowing each charm with significant meaning. There’s something ritualistic in the way Loretta and her husband value jewelry. The bracelet is the connective tissue to her mother that, perhaps, she hopes to pass down to her daughter one day? The bracelet also haunts her husband, expediting the only real source of friction within their marriage. He places value in his masculine appearance and patriarchal grip of their partnership. In a sense, he entangles the bracelet with Loretta’s suggestion that they get married, thus challenging his traditional lens of what society deems acceptable in a monogamous heterosexual engagement. The bracelet holds immense emotional value which she protects and her husband tries to weaponize it’s monetary value through establishing his role as head of the household patriarchy. He assigns blame to the robbery by, “pointing out that if she had listened to him and sold the bracelet when the price of gold was up, she would at least have a nice amount of money for it” (Maffei 1). He might not have the emotional depth to empathize with the symbolic meaning; unable to separate her connection and his profiteering like oil and water in a glass jar. He is proud and his pride is rooted in masculine appearance. Loretta’s sense of a “lingering resentment” throughout their relationship, implies that the ghost of her mother and the ghost of expectation exist in the bracelet (Maffei 3).
Karen’s jewelry based value system is the most tragic. She assigns the bracelet to a false sense of security wherein it serves as fodder to a spiritual escape she’ll never get. It’s deeply hard wired to her nervous system and, when faced with the possibility of losing it, screams in anguish and despair indicating that she is the most possessed by the ghost within. We know that Karen finds no pride in the appearance of this piece of jewelry because she, “didn’t even like the bracelet. It was clunky and heavy and old-fashioned looking” (Maffei 4). Yet, she attaches herself onto it for dear life. She uses it as a device to suppress trauma, because “Bobby would notice,” and do something much worse than put another hole in the kitchen wall (Maffei 4). The bracelet is a quiet and apprehensive accomplice to Karen; doing, I would argue, more harm than good. It celebrates the path of least resistance and dangerously encourages Karen’s inward retreat; too afraid for “I told you so’s” from her parents and friends. She endures the abuse isolated and alone. Karen thinks the bracelet protects her but it actually enables Bobby to keep getting away with his angry episodes, which “were happening more, not less” since his time in Vietnam (Maffei 4). When Loretta reaches to grab the bracelet, Karen screams, in part because, the gesture and physical language of Loretta’s grab triggers a reaction in Karen that I would assume mirrors violence done unto her in the past. The ghost doesn’t want to be exorcised from Karen; conflating her denial with unhealthy coping mechanisms. I’ve thought a lot about Maffei’s insertion of the junk yard imagery and while it appropriately contrasts the shiny new cars and merchandise at the mall, it also serves as a place where objects that formerly had meaning, go to die. It’s a paradoxical ecosystem (shiny mall/stinky dump) that we want so bad for Karen to appreciate, because it would set her free. If she could only liberate material apologies by throwing them away, she might build up her strength. At the same time, the bracelet is just another piece of scrap metal that Karen will eventually discard, and in so doing, the ghost will simply possess the next thing. Didn’t I mention paradox? Karen will also develop a negative association with gifts and objects that should possess intrinsic value, yet she will always be conditioned to assume that a gifted item is merely a stitch in the quilt of her pain.
Loretta needs her jewelry the most and, is therefore, the most deserving of the happiness and comfort it brings. For starters, she is the only woman who can exert ownership over it. Mathilde borrows the diamond necklace and is so concerned over what it can do for her, that she fails to appreciate the object in and of its self. Karen’s husband, unawares, bought it stolen from a pawn shop. Mathilde and Karen’s reliance on their jewelry is tantamount. It is a fake diamond just like her fake narcissism and for Karen it is a fake sense of security. The necklace forces Mathilde’s husband to borrow money he doesn’t have and “compromise all the rest of his life” (Maupassant 595). It has almost insatiable and gluttonous implication because it suddenly pollutes Loisel’s (Mathilde’s husband’s) own values and he is quick to subject himself to its power. He is the first person to suggest that they lie to her friend in order to buy more time. He proposes suggesting that the clasp broke and at the same time the clasp to a comfortable middle class yoke breaks. While they do pay the debt, Mathilde still jettison’s their misfortune on her friend as opposed to the necklace itself or her own actions. It has manipulative and damaging consequences that would only be repeated and fuel more consumption should she get her hands on another one. Finally, when she is presented with an about-face, she redirects her energy into “what could have been” had she never lost it. As much as I empathize with Karen and agree that yielding to the bracelets protective powers avoid Bobby’s harshness, it is also a never-ending cycle that is only perpetuated by allowing Karen to hide. She is a victim, yes, and the tragedy lies in her choosing the path of least resistance; a path that encourages silence and weakness. It does not benefit her. It is in this way that Loretta’s ownership is not only the least harmful to herself and those around her, but it supports the healthiest of the value systems heretofore discussed - celebration and memory. There’s also something both Maupassant and Maffei do in establishing how consumerism enforces our lives. As Loretta dashes out of the mall in pursuit of her bracelet, she is navigating, “manikins [that] jutted their narrow hips, glass jewelry counters, and heady perfumes” (Maffei 3). These are incessant reminders of programmed femininity which are generalized by Maupassant, “Glory of her success composed of all this homage, of all this admiration, of all these awakened desires, and of that sense of complete victory which is so sweet to a woman’s heart” (593). Something Mathilde certainly gets caught up in and something that reinforces the subservience in Karen. She’s supposed to surrender her autonomy in the face of gifts? Bobby is conditioned to think that a woman need only receive a gift in order to excuse his aggressive abuse. Bobby strengthens the criticism Maupassant makes by asserting through his actions that women are only of value based on status and the things they own. This kind of exhaustive thinking undermines female autonomy as it suggests women are easily distracted and preoccupied by cosmetics, dresses, and jewelry. Loretta doesn’t need the bracelet to define her femininity; it transcends her gender and encompasses her whole selfhood. The charms each tell stories that contain more depth than simply a single piece of jewelry.
It is ubiquitous human nature to assign value to things we own or hope to possess. Materialism is measured by every notch in the ruler of life: Buy a car, close on a house, send our kids to the best college. It’s how we evaluate our status and confirm that of others. Mathilde, Loretta, and Karen all organize a substantial portion of their value systems in these specific pieces of jewelry out of desperation to appear wealthy, reverent remembrance, and safety. Loretta, is the most deserving because the bracelet did actually belong to her: it wasn’t borrowed or stolen and it isn’t enabling danger, silence, or avarice. She merely carries the memory of her mother and, if I may go so far, she carries the template that influences her own autonomy. Each charm is essentially a building block that’s been invested into her identity. Despite historical context, all three of these women are survivors. They are also haunted by the ghosts that came before them; ghosts that also navigated sexism, racism, classism, and patriarchy. History and our societal makeup haunt all of us and we all must identify the ghosts that shape our own lives.
Essay #2; 2023
Kafka’s Germany was a nightmare of unsettling distortion and untrustworthy geometry. A place where the vulnerable many are exploited by the powerful few with no terms and agreements – services rendered. He condenses the world he occupies into the Samsa household - a place of transaction where the consumer sucks dry the life force of the individual. The individual being both objectified as a product with steep taxes they themselves must pay. Gregor is sold into a world of capitalistic gain and then when he can longer provide, he’s quickly devalued as an obsolete “It,” void of any sense of identity. In this case, the loss of identity is the loss of artistic integrity.
If we look through a Marxist lens at Kafka’s criticism of the capitalist machine, we can redefine the Samsa household as a marketplace where expenditure and commerce come at the cost of Gregor’s autonomy. The Samsa marketplace is mythologized through a prism of labels that make up the framework of Gregor’s identity and how they are stripped away through imposed gendered, religious, sexualized, and artistic taxes. Once these taxes are itemized, there’s nothing left to support the ongoing overhead and Gregor succumbs to exhaustion. He can no longer provide for the consumer, his family, who up to this point have profited from his labors. Here, his family perpetuates a Kafkaesque marketplace by lazily reaping benefits on the exploitation of others. His sluggish family must find a new Gregor and they find him in Grete who can ease their burdens. The consumers are indifferent to personhood and artistry, they want to be comfortable. The collapsing consequences of these transactions lead to Gregor’s irrelevance and discardment.
Kafka established the rules of his marketplace through Gregor’s artistic perception. Gregor questioning the physique of his father’s newfound erectness and combed hair severity, for example, in contrast with the ambiguousness of Gregor’s new body; non-binary and void of definite shape. This calcifies the idea that no amount of transformative specificity, literal or metaphysical, will save the individual from leasing their personhood. Already the consumer – in this case the reader - is granted permission to buy what they choose – a bug, monster, or some combination of the two.
Maleness is a tax in the Samsa marketplace which Gregor has never quite aligned himself with. The smile, feminine and soft, is in conflict with a patriarchal societal normative. In this case, maleness, and the privilege thereof, is a tax.
The glossy lady on the wall, something that Gregor quite literally clings to, depicts both Gregor’s connective tissue to his remaining humanity and his deconstruction from adulthood into infancy. Gregor through his gender confinement, can’t hope to achieve the sexualized objectification that women have in the marketplace. This goes so far as Gregor’s incestual ownership of his sister, “He would never again let her out of his room; his sister, however, should not be forced to stay with him, but would do so of her own free will. Gregor would raise himself up to her shoulder and kiss her on the neck” (36). Already as Grete blooms into this objectified new product, Gregor is foreshadowing her sexualization tax.
As Grete gains her own autonomy (and marketplace value), Gregor loses his. When the oil well dries up that is Gregor, Grete becomes the new plentiful lithium mine that will fuel electric cars.
The cost of these transactional cascades result in Gregor’s death and Grete having, “blossomed into a good-looking shapley girl,” (42) ready for marriage. The last line of the novella is a nod to a provocative stretching of her young body which Kafka wanted to emphasize. I’m trying to demonstrate how greedy consumerism harvests all they can from one resource and then, without hesitation, move on to the next. Unfortunately, we’ve already witnessed Grete being sexually solicited for the lodgers benefit who stand with, “hands in pockets, much too close behind.” (35). Sex sells. We see Gregor’s mother resorting to sell lingerie. Gregor goes mad, “look how these roomers are gorging, and I’m dying!” (34). Gorging on what? Survival in the Samsa marketplace is reduced to sex, objectification, and fueling the rich. Culture and beauty become obsolete at the expense of profit. Maybe I choose to be more cynical but I see everyone as a victim of transaction. I see Grete and Gregor both groomed and drained of their resources at the expense of everyone around them. It is in this way that Kafka challenges the banal capitalization of the worker to live always on the threshold of sliding down the evolutionary ladder. Gregor’s metamorphosis isn’t an escape into art, but art tapped dry and discarded. He wakes into a world of lust, greed, and manipulation only to be blamed when his identity is reduced to a commodity. The ambiguity within Kafka’s language and expression sculpt a marketplace where transactions exasperate the reduction of the individual. It has me considering how ‘The Metamorphosis’ would lose its esoteric power if it had been franchised into a Netflix series with adjacent action figures, sacrificing art and self-expression for gain. When that becomes the case, it all gets stripped down to an ambiguous “It.”
Works Cited
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915), Translated and Edited by Stanley Corngold, Norton Critical Edition, 1996.
Essay #3, The Real Outsiders; 2023
Education, as we’ll consider it here, can be broken down into several fragments: History (and one’s relationship to it), language insofar as “Englishness” and adolescent coming-of-age. Bildungsroman in structure, both Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions track female adolescent assimilation into western culture through education. It is through the intersectionality of race, culture, class, and gender that I noticed a trend greater than the sum of their parts in the ways they are ostracized by their communities as a consequence of education. The privilege between Marjane, Tambu, and Nyasha is stark and obviously something to consider as we compare their widening otherness, but I hope to prove that as they learn to locate their oppressors, negotiate how they speak, and participate in youthful impulses they also, painfully, disfigure their link to a past life.
Education, the escape hatch from the windowless room of oppression, grants the great gift of autonomy. The price, however, is to become a stranger in the mirror; forever forfeiting a participatory return to former notions of selfhood. Marjane, having been assimilated into western culture, no longer recognizes her reflection, and painfully feels that she has been, “reduced to nothing” while “constantly wearing a mask” (271). Education (I’ll use education to primarily represent a liberal western approach) situates the individual on a collision course with emancipation, but education in the third world does not always share the same values as the shared experience of a cultural collective. Especially a third world culture that has been eroded and damaged by the painful history of colonization. This emancipation forever casts a shadow of estrangement, much like the monotonous veil imposed on Marjane Satrapi, making her unrecognizable among their native peers.
Satrapi, in her comically heartbreaking autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis, notices, through the consequences of her emancipation, that when she returned to Iran, “most people, in search of a cloud of happiness, had forgotten their political conscience” (323). They do this in a determined effort to retain what little bits of normal livelihood they have left under an often violent theocratic regime. This is the germ that a person cannot return to their former selves after ditching the yoke of colonial oppression. The Iranians that she speaks of have unfortunately adopted the rituals of an oppressive state to avoid harsh penalties and even the women she grew up with, who are fascinated by western culture, condemn her to whoredom when they’ve drunk their fill. Marjane returns to Iran and even challenges some of these conditions, but will be forever looked at as a “Westerner in Iran” (272).
In addition to the ostracization of Marjane we should look at the duality of Tambu and Nyasha in Tsi Tsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Obviously these female protagonists come from very different class backgrounds. Dangarembga’s characters are displaced to a homestead in degraded poverty with “the poverty of blackness on one side and the weight of womanhood on the other” (16). They endure unjust sharecropping practices on rejected stony barren land unfit for the British colonizers. It would be grossly unfair to view the hardships of these women to Marjane as she traces her lineage through a bourgeois bilingual family with resources to attend a French school in Vienna; however, they are all criticized for their degrees of assimilation. All three characters are struggling with the process of expansion and by extension, the process of escape. Marjane struggles with, what Typhaine Leservot claims is, a schizophrenic response to Iran’s built in Occidentalism. In her essay, “Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapis’ Persepolis”, she supports how Satrapi, “clearly underlines the extent to which the westernization of Iran is more a product, ironically, of fundamentalist Islam than it is of western neo-colonialism” (127). In other words, Marjane throughout the course of her youth respects the ideas of westernism “in the comfort of her own private production of the west that had gone unchallenged by reality” (Leservot 124). She wears Nike sneakers, rides in a Cadillac, listens to Michael Jackson, and reads Sartre. It is only when she returns after her stint in Vienna that she becomes a decadent prisoner of these same kinds of objects. Marjane recognizes her former friends dolled up like the heroines of American TV. Marjane explains, “When something is forbidden, it takes on a disproportionate importance. Making themselves up and wanting to follow western ways was an act of resistance on their part” (259). Through the Occidentalism approach we see how the craving for makeup and TV essentially becomes “woke” through spiritual strengthening, but since these friends’ attitudes reflect their own internal perceptions of the west, they are still greatly troubled from learning that Marjane is on the pill or has slept with several partners. Their curiosity only goes so far insomuch as championing the idea of rebellion while being too afraid to achieve it.
This happens with the women in Nervous Conditions during the Lucia hearing. The patriarchy exclusively holds a trial where Lucia’s pregnancy and “stubbornness’ are being evaluated, essentially her own autonomy. The women, including Lucia, are forced to await the verdict in an isolated kitchen: “Everybody needed to broaden out a little, to stop and consider the alternatives, but the matter was too intimate. It stung too saltily, too sharply and agonizingly the sensitive images that the women had of themselves, images that were really no more than reflections. Each retreated more resolutely into their roles… It was a last solitary, hopeless defense of the security of their illusions” (138). I argue that these scenes parallel the exact gendered role politics built out of violent oppression. Again, we see the distant eye-squinting shadow of patriarchal colonization shroud the open-mindedness of women not privileged enough to leave their cultural allegiance. Dangarembga’s women know all too well the injustices that plague them but are too conditioned through generations of silence to stand up against it, therefore, retreating into their roles for safety. Maiguru, the matriarch and aunt to Tambu, is a perfect candidate as someone old enough to accept her bonds shackling her to her autocratic husband even though she has the financial and academic independence to break them. She is a prisoner of colonization downplaying her elevated language to baby-talk. Marjane’s peers understand the allure of sexual autonomy but are prevented from seeking it through this collective solidarity. They recognize that it’s safer to cast out the outsider no matter how much they want to be her.
There’s a scene in Nervous Conditions where youthful rebellion is center stage. Tambu, fundamentally aware that her dancing is sexualized, has conditioned her to associate dancing as sinful shame, therefore degrading her physical autonomy to rigid and tentative gestures: “As I had grown older and the music had begun to speak to me more clearly, my movements had grown stronger, more rhythmical and luxuriant; but people had not found it amusing anymore, so that in the end I realized that there were bad implications in the way I enjoyed the rhythm” (42). This is the same way in which the veil and separate staircase in Iran hide the shameful shape of being a woman – as an object to be lusted after. The men, on the other hand, are never demanded to adhere to a dress code. Marjane, Nyasha, and Tambu all find rebellion in the form of dance. Dance in this sense becomes a part of their western education: Marjane and her friends dance to Kim Wilde at illegal parties and Nyasha and Tambu attend the school rave where the “crash of electric guitars” encouraged Tambu’s feet, “to slide and glide and tap of their own accord” (110-111). The kids dance to electric guitars and new dance moves, insinuating a western influence. Marjane, while in Vienna, “really understood the meaning of the sexual revolution. It was my first step toward assimilating into western culture” (188). Are we saying that pop-culture and sexual awareness are more consequential than any sort of academic furtherance? Is this where real education is situated? Marjane’s first interaction in Vienna is to discuss “very in” pearl pink lipstick; navigating a zoomed in approach to a world of Coca-Cola colored Santa’s and the pill.
As they come home late, Nyasha is violently abused at the hands of her father, Babamukuru, who condemns her to whoredome, “making her a victim of her femaleness” (115) just because she stayed out late talking to a boy – a small freedom she wouldn’t know without her emboldened autonomy. Tambu recognizes, “The victimization, I saw, was universal. It didn’t depend on poverty, on lack of education, or on tradition. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness” (115-116). This supports the fact that no amount of classism separates the banishment of liberated women. Nyasha was talking with a white boy, probably fantasizing over excerpts from Lady Chatterley’s Lover wearing miniskirts and being alienated for it. Flirting with impulses that 1960’s youth should be able to have. Gillian Gorle, in her essay “Fighting the Good Fight: What Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions Says About Language and Power,” argues that “Her [Nyasha] linguistic exile is inextricably bound up with her female exile, for it is her English schooling that has given her the tools with which to challenge the patriarchal assumptions of Shona culture” (188). She is criticized by her classmates: “she thinks she is white. She is proud. She is loose” (94). She is blamed for her female approach while Babamakuru is treated like a god and savior. He postures as an elitist with china in a glass cabinet while never being criticized as snobby.
It's interesting, too, how Tambu’s classmates (largely unscathed by her classmates' loathing of Nyasha) finally turn their backs to her when she is accepted into the Sacred Heart Convent. They no longer welcome her to play and instead use western sports – hockey, basketball, swimming – to categorize her as white. In a similar situation, Marjane’s classmates turn their backs on her when they discover that the pill has a different function. She defends herself: “My body is my own! It’s nobody else’s business! (303), but realizes that her classmates are forbidding her what’s forbidden to them. Marjane realizes that her peers could be synonymous with the state. I think what Marjane fails to recognize is that these oppressive stances are a defense mechanism against tyranny. Paralyzing fear is the driving force of oppression. Marjane and Tambu have become contagious diseases better left alone.
Marjane has her roots in Iran and even though the west was available to her, she saw it through the same Occidentalism lens of her peers, drafting their own perceptions while honoring their collective roles. Gorle argues that Tambu, “has never left her society, she is firmly grounded in Shona etiquette and knows how to behave with tact while retaining the freedom to be herself” (9). Gorle goes on to say, Tambu adopts the grateful poor female relative with the same schizophrenia that Marjane arms herself with. Tambu and Marjane can both still speak the language of their peers, dealing with the harsh blows, but remaining buoyant above the insults. Tambu defends her cultural footing by contrasting to her cousin: “Nyasha knew nothing about leaving. She had only been taken to places. She did not know what essential part of you stayed behind no matter how violently you tried to dislodge them in order to take with you” (173). I believe this proves that while Marjane, Tambu and Nyasha all deal the blows of alienation, Tambu and Marjane are able to blend in because of their childhood proximity to their roots. They both have this schizophrenic ability while Nyasha, brought to England as a child in a speed run towards western assimilation, takes on more of a realist approach unable to redirect her identity.
As we’ve noticed, there are various degrees of ostracization. The more western you are, the more you are rejected. Nyasha’s rugged western individualism strips everything from her but her own body where, according to Lindsay Aegerter, “bulimia signifies her refusal to swallow a sexist ideology she cannot stomach” (237). Bulimia, a western disease, becomes her greatest asset for physical autonomy as a way to rebel against a father who continues to demand that she eat. In Aegerter’s essay, “A Dialectic of Autonomy and Community: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions”, she argues that Nyasha, “unable to communicate with her cousin, is alienated from the familial and cultural identity; she is alienated from herself and becomes the female other” (237). In a pluralist sense, Tambu and Nyasha represent two sides of the same coin: to escape from and cling to African heritage. Marjane, racially profiled as a third-worlder in Vienna, finally shouts, “I am Iranian and proud of it! (197). Both Tambu and Marjane have somehow managed to retain their heritage by acknowledging that they are a fully dimensional person, proud of their roots, no matter how oppressive they may be, thus granting them access to leave it behind. Nyasha, who left it behind, is no longer granted re-entry.
Shame is also a huge component throughout these novels. In fact, there is a significant amount of guilt-filled shame at not being available to their families and struggling societies. Marjane changes the channel anytime there’s news about Iran, unable to stomach it. She also returns with shame preferring “to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud, the shame of having become a mediocre nihilist” (244). Shame becomes depression which manifests itself into a failed suicide attempt similar to Nyasha’s slow debilitation through bulimia. When the shame and guilt of not meeting expectations builds, these women both take it out on themselves because no one around them understands them. Without the ability and resources to communicate, they internalize it into helpless isolation with dangerous consequences.
There’s a devastating scene where Marjane’s moral compass is compromised. After her return to Iran, to avoid suspicion of wearing rebellious makeup, she devises a horribly misguided plan to risk the life of an innocent human being. She distracts the guardians by assigning blame to an innocent man, “there’s a guy who said something indecent to me!” (285) and they arrest him putting his very life at risk. I believe this is a way for Marjane to not only use her privilege as a resource, but her newfound westernism as a means of deconstructing the individuality of others. He’s just a guy who “looked a little scruffy” (291). He’s just another Iranian third worlder to her in this scene, ambiguous and unimportant; someone to separate from.
We also need to look at both the progressive and fundamentalist values between the parents in these two novels. Marjane’s mother, by the end, orders Marjane to never come back, that “The Iran of today is not for you” (341). Marjane as a girl is given challenging text, encouragement to “keep your dignity and be true to yourself” (150) and her parents subscribe to a no questions asked policy. Tambu on the other hand, is raised to endure and obey, to respect discouragement, and to not be “self-absorbed over intellectual pursuits” (33). Tambu’s emancipation is fully up to herself while Marjane makes collaborative decisions with her parents. Marjane “was not fed western images encouraging cheap and shallow consumption; rather, she actively interacted with western culture on a sophisticated level” (Leservot 121). Through this veil of exposure, however, she realizes her parents own hypocrisy as both capitalistic benefactors and revolutionaries which accelerates her individualistic departure. Both Marjane and Tambu keep their judgements of their parents locked up, granting them re-entry access later on while Nyasha speaks up to parental authority resulting in strict punishments.
Finally, when Marjane, Tambu and Nyasha can no longer communicate in a language spoken by their culture, they are forced to leave physically, mentally, and emotionally. Marjane can no longer look at her reflection with an unconsciously incompetent attitude, instead she see’s the nervous condition of shameful otherness. Tambu retreats quicker into nervous silence as she can’t quite handle the weight of her preconceived notions being untangled and Nyasha rejects the very nutritive sustenance that so many underprivileged Africans beg for. I believe ultimately that the individual that adopts “Englishness” adopts a language of power and emerges from the veil of oppression that they officially forfeit their admission to the collective. The antenna is already been installed in the brain and peers have seen it. It has opened them up to the influence of western upward mobility and while the road forward is full of painful exclusion it does, I offer, grant a glimmer of hope. Otherness as the growing pains of freedom.
Works Cited
1. Aegerter, Lindsay Pentolfe. “A Dialectic of Autonomy and Community: Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 15, no. 2, 1996, pp. 231–40. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/464133. Accessed 10 July 2023.
2. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, Seal Press, 1988
3. Gorle, Gilian. “Fighting the Good Fight: What Tsitsi Dangarembga’s ‘Nervous Conditions’ Says about Language and Power.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 27, 1997, pp. 179–92. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3509141. Accessed 10 July 2023.
4. Leservot, Typhaine. “Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persépolis.’” French Forum, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 115–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41306680. Accessed 10 July 2023.
5. Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, Pantheon, 2004
Essay #11; 2024
In Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Mike has returned to Earth after having been raised by Martians. Harshaw, a neo-pessimist idealist, claims, “Man is the animal who laughs,” in an attempt to illustrate the essence of the human race (Heinlein, 169). He dictates that we subscribe to doctrines and the cultural codification we were born into, suggesting that the projections we make can’t be so easily swept under the rug. We are, especially in the digital-era of social media dominating the cultural narrative, programmed into accepting the algorithmic intake of ideals. I am perfectly aware that I’m complicit in supporting a consumerist agenda, that’s completely entwined with a political one. I’m also aware that it’s the other way around. I think that’s what’s so dangerous about tech companies operating without guardrails. The economic and military big players have failed to look into the rearview-mirror at the tech empires closing in. We’ve seen the disparity in our political landscape grow wider as we’ve become more and more indoctrinated to the idealisms and allegiances fed to us on social media; and as we’ve adopted more resolute stances fueled by them, we are less interested in outwardly being critical of them. That’s largely what I find rather perplexing in this novel. Given the gravity of contact with another interplanetary race, the people of Earth seem to be having no cathartic crisis; no uprooted existentialism. They continue to be steadfast in their religious framework and beliefs. Life goes on with very few questions. No one is questioning God and their values remain intact. I think that’s why everyone in this novel is so obsessed with pushing an agenda on Mike – it is easier to assimilate him, an innocent “egg,” than to question something that could erode their belief systems. As Harshaw expresses, “All of us are prisoners of our early indoctrinations, for it is hard, very nearly impossible, to shake off one’s earliest training” (Heinlein 146). Harshaw is not innocent of plagiarizing this philosophy – he’s a hypocrite, condemning everyone else for forcing their values on Mike, when later, he himself, talks about kissing only girls preaching a full court press on conditioned male hetero allegiance. Shouldn’t all of these preconceived notions erupt upon the discovery of extraterrestrials? How can they possibly still hold onto traditional values when everything is now being challenged?
It's interesting reading Neil Postman’s essay, “Future Schlock” from his book, Conscientious Objections: Stirring up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education, in an age where T.V. has given up center stage to the information machine that is social media. What could he possibly think now? His enemies to intelligence are lurking everywhere online, lighting tinder in the hopes or starting wildfires: ignorance, superstition (conspiracy), cruelty to name but a few. Social media is that coke bottle in the desert; the bone turned tool turned space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey: “How does a culture change when new technologies are introduced to it? And is it always desirable for a culture to accommodate itself to the demands of new technologies?” Postman asks (397). I think in Heinlein’s novel, they haven’t yet asked this question – Smith, in a sense, is a new technology. He is heir to advanced systems like the Lyle Drive, but he is, certainly to Harshaw’s advantage, a weapon capable of great annihilation. He’s a technology that could advance the fields of psychology with his telekinesis abilities. Perhaps he could heal? Biblically, he’s a Jesus Christ figure who has apostles (water brothers) conducting miracles without an agenda. The problem is that Earth didn’t ask for this. He’s not addicting enough yet, like Big Tobacco or TikTok. Earth isn’t ready to discard their philosophy. Duke, a skeptic of Mike, says, “Oh, I admit I don’t go to church much, but I was brought up right. I’m no infidel. I’ve got faith” (Heinlein, 144). It is this faith that stands so resolute and unable to assimilate. It’s this concept of instinct versus conditioned reflex that inhibits Earth from seeing the technological opportunity that Mike represents. The upper echelons of society haven’t figured out how to profit from him aside from acquiring the deed to Mars which has been determined as having little real-estate value.
If we take into account Harshaw’s opinion that, “everything and anything about a culture can be inferred from the shape of its language” (Heinlein, 136) then maybe this is the blocked artery? As Rachel Martin discovered on the 2006 campaign trail in Ohio, politicians were posturing as evangelicals to get the vote. In other words, they adopted the language of their prospective constituents – quoting scripture, attending mega-churches, playing dress-up in a relationship to God. Of course, many evangelicals see through this phoniness and inauthenticity, but many don’t (or rather choose not to out of convenience). The public square is swollen with political mobilization ranging from ads on Christian radio to fanaticism. What begins to emerge for Martin, is a wish by many to see a leader demonstrate real values and “start setting a moral agenda” (NPR). Many are disillusioned by faith mandated public policy and politicians know how to capitalize on it. Smith is not a propagandist, he’s an egg. Harshaw knows this and attempts to keep him safe knowing full-well that many crooks understand the game. In this sense, Mike is the evangelical community.
Postman warns that, “T.V. is the command center for our culture” and that news has become mere entertainment obsessed with ratings; good T.V. This morning I was watching an MSNBC video on updates out of Gaza when during the ad break, I was advertised a T-Mobile phone plan. The Fosterite (a fanatical religious sect in Heinlein’s novel) televangelical proceeding is interrupted in a similar way, “Always look for that happy, holy seal-of-approval with Bishop Digby’s smiling face on it. Don’t let a sinner palm off something ‘just as good.’ Our sponsors support us; they deserve your support” (Heinlein, 156). We’ve completely numbed ourselves to the horrible and devastating consequences of war and aggressive oppressors, largely because we’ve allowed it to happen. Postman reminded me of John Cleese’s, “And now for something completely different” as a means of coping; trading in emotional fatigue for dopamine highs. To allow companies to profit. There’s also this larger connection to symbols, right? Mike is starting to connect these dots – guns are bad, serpent is evil, etc. Mike is even compared to a black widow, small but powerful. Language has become increasingly digitized in video images/symbols. These “forms of communication become good or bad depending on their relationship to other symbols and on the functions they are made to serve within a sacred order” (Postman, 402). Postman goes on to express how we increasingly see the world in fragmented pictures, orienting other mediums to follow suit (401). The world is watching Mike, but in a narrative driven by image not entirely truthful. They faked an actor to pose as Mike, and everyone swallowed it. The danger here is that we are conditioned to absorb everything we see as truth. Faith can’t be argued with. A truth dictated by the powerful few and tricked down through the media. Factions splinter off into extreme political idealisms that can turn violent. The January insurrection is a case in point. The media circus that is now following Smith is not prepared to learn anything from him, they only want to make him one of them. Maybe his discovery is so huge, that the only way to comprehend his magnitude is to re-mold him in God's image? The image of their own reflections. His legitimacy would hardly stand in Postman’s televised entertainment sphere – we would assume it was AI, or a hoax and perhaps turn even more inward for safety, grasping our philosophy and truth with a more desperate grip. As a culture dies, we see a larger and often more violent resurgence of those trying to protect its mortality.
Works Cited
1.Heinein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. Penguin Random House LLC, 1961.
2. Postman, Neil. Conscientious Objections. Vintage, 1988
3. Martin, Rachel. “All Things will Ultimately Work,” “Republicans Zig; Will Christian Conservatives Zag,” and “Democratic Party Embraces ‘Values’ Debate.” NPR, 2006
Essay #8; 2023
The framework on which our social structures are built, rely, primarily, on the subjugation of others in order to retain power – or, often, the illusion of it. We can look at this through an assortment of angles – a kaleidoscope of colonial, patriarchal, and racially discriminate lenses, but no matter the vantage point, we see groups exerting dominance over others. In Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie recognizes the application of this theory through the hateful power dynamics of Mrs. Turner: “Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t” (Hurston, 138). Similarly, Mike Smith, in Robert Heinlein’s, Stranger in a Strange Land, laughs for the first time when he witnesses a monkey reciprocating the beating he just took on an even weaker monkey; a perfect illustration of instinctual indoctrination into the power dynamics of propping up on the lesser. It’s clear how these two novels examine, not only how dominance is used to keep the lesser in their place, but simultaneously try to reduce their victims’ power. Through the pain of colonization, unchecked sovereignty, and the abstract concept of western idealism, control is used to protect, legitimize authority, and offset blinding jealousies.
Nanny, born into slavery, can’t possible comprehend that Janie might have more opportunities at her disposal. She is firmly rooted in the inescapable reality that, “De white man is de ruler of everything” (Hurston, 14). The scar of slavery and colonization force Nanny’s restrictive authority over Janie. Nanny, through the misguided guise of protection, tries to safely confine Janie to a marriage with no “bloom.” She hopes that by controlling Janie’s destiny as a black woman, she can save her from rape, abuse, and disappointment. we see a parallel to Mike’s forced feeding of cultural expectations. As Jill tries to teach him the playbook of social customs and morals, Jubal criticizes, “you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist” (Heinlein, 121). Here, we see Jill controlling Mike through her impulse to protect him. Mike and Janie are built for better stuff, but the instinct of others is to assimilate and control their decisions. Perhaps, so they too are not disenfranchised like Jill and Nanny? Both Janie and Mike resist the protection and find autonomy devised of their own making. The negligence of their protectors to recognize their ambitions and individuality ultimately undermine their authority by serving to accelerate a hardening of values – in Janie’s case, love and passion, and, for Mike, equity and understanding.
Next, we can look at the role of political power and how authority figures take possession of their community, be it township or congregation. Neil Postman, in his book, Conscientious Objections, challenges the “fragmentation of new mediums built on entertainment value” not unlike the Church of New Revelation setup – a launchpad for erotic fanaticism and morally loose indulgences. Postman goes on to argue, “forms of communication become good or bad depending on their relationship to other symbols and functions” (Postman, 402). Suddenly gambling, sex, and alcohol camouflage a theological subscription for an eternal happiness package. Christian scaffolding gives way to reveal the crumbling bricks of traditional vices. Jubal claims, “They knew what would sell, and they were in business” (Heinlein, 304). He talks about a congregation consuming a sermon dressed up in biblical language where suddenly the ice cold martini becomes the bait and switch for a brainwashing tyranny of the soul. Obviously, strong values can resist the temptation of this Vegas evangelical branding, but still, the church profits and plenty of constituents give in to being controlled by the glamor. Authority postures as the smooth politician and strengthens its position. In other words, the charismatic televangelist, Digby, becomes what people want to be themselves – saved and subservient to a higher order (in Digby’s case, subservient to God). Jody, in a parallel, uses his mayorship to demonstrate patriarchal authority over his community. No one is owned and reduced more than Janie. Jody possesses her, “She’s uh woman and her place is in de home,” forcing her to hide her hair and be the submissive wife (Hurston, 41). Adjacent to his mistreatment of her, we see how Jody adopts the harshness of the white masters he once served and uses it against his black peers in Eatonville. He’s been conditioned to understand the significance of concealing weak appearances; violating Janie’s personhood as a means of generating authority among his constituents. Mike, eventually, follows the example of the Fosterites and legitimizes his own authority as the leader of the Church of All Worlds. Telekinesis and mind tricks play off like plastic miracles while unquestioned polyamorous pleasure establish unity. He has recalibrated his values, using truth and spiritualism as armor. Janie, in a defining moment, emasculates her oppressor by implicating his infertility and aging body in front of other men, and thus robbing him “of his illusion of irresistible maleness,” which diminishes his authority (Hurston, 75). As she resists being a pawn in his power machine, she adopts the value of retaliation.
Finally, I want to look at the ways in which Janie and Mike are imprisoned by symbolic shackles like money, monogamy, pornography, and materialism. Jealousy erupts from a dependance on the possession of western concepts. In a metaphysical way, are we prisoners of our jealousies more than we are prisoners of the symbols themselves? Helena Norberg Hodge witnesses, in her essay, “The Pressure to Modernize and Globalize,” the decomposing values and discarded cultural embrace the Ladakh people underwent when western influence infiltrated their isolated community. She predicted “young Ladakhi’s to develop feelings of inferiority, to reject their own culture wholesale, and at the same time to eagerly embrace the global monoculture” (Hodges). She sees the loss of individuality and differences taking on new political dimensions resulting in bitterness and envy. Janie knows that people are jealous and judgmental of her, trying hard to restrain her from transforming into the modern woman of the reconstructed south. Finally, she lets her hair down, dawns her overalls and working boots, and begins to author her own experience. Her pretty dresses and exposed hair instigate harsh judgements on her character, yet still she shows it and indulges in her femininity. Mrs. Turner attempts to ally herself with Janie because of her “coffee-and-cream” complexion trying to suggest that they are better than those with blacker skin. We see toxic racial venom pumping through America’s cultural veins firsthand. Hurston describes the people in the muck as, “People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor,” yet for the first time Janie finds real community and liberty here among them; able to pick beans in anonymity (Hurston, 125). However, the solidarity of poverty - the great equalizer among the muck - is broken when ideas of Janie’s independence are exploited and envied after Tea Cake’s death. As the cracks show, we see how jealousy, malice, and envy are critical cogs in the machine of power. Society dresses up their insecure jealousies to appear dominant over those they can take advantage of. Tea Cake does this too as his, “being able to whip her reassured him in possession” amid a crisis of envy (Hurston, 140). Mike’s greatest fear is that his Martian people would “make us over into their own image” erasing our symbols and substituting them with theirs (Heinlein, 493). Mike can’t fully grok the concept of jealousy, as it doesn’t translate into Martian but he recognizes Earth’s dependance on advertising, consumerism, titles, clothes and want. He, and perhaps Jubal, see how humans are possessed and owned by the pursuit to make a buck. However, despite Mike’s erasure of materialism, he still relies on a power structure that puts him at the top, becoming more of a communist Stalin figure than George Washington on the dollar bill. Janie, in complete possession of herself, returns to Eatonville proudly wearing her denim and making the case for love – proving that she has dominated those hoping to dominate her. She is who she wants to be and an encouragement to other women.
Jubal insists that, “ownership, of anything, is an extremely sophisticated abstraction,” yet we see people do this again and again (Heinlein, 219). Both Mike and Janie come to terms with the hold that others have over them and crawl out from underneath it in different ways. Mike becomes a leader with power over those seeking enlightenment, while Janie has power over her destiny. The pecking order of life’s power structures resemble the monkey’s in the cage – one can be both the oppressed and the oppressor. These two texts, through the intersection of race, religion, and consumerism, examine civilizations DNA and how it’s coded to control. Whether it's the need to protect, the need to exercise authority, or to channel jealousy, society will always turn to the lesser monkey and bonk it on the head.
Works Cited
1. Heinlein, Robert A. Stranger in a Strange Land. Penguin Random House LLC, 1961.
2. Hodge, Helena Norberg. “The Pressure to Modernize and Globalize.” The Case Against the Global Economy, edited by Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, Sierra Club Books, 1996, pp 158-167.
3. Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. J.B. Lippincott, Inc., 1937
4. Postman, Neil. Conscientious Objections. Vintage, 1988
Essay #5; 2023
There is a rather sobering effect that a life struggle has on a person. Childhood is remarkable in that it suggests an intoxicated ambiguity of one’s self as it relates to identity – the prologue before indoctrination into oppressive institutions. Janie dreams of finding her bloom, but she didn’t fully grasp that she was standing at the road posts of race, gender, and poverty – all of which govern the enslavement of one’s sacred right to define themselves on their terms. To keep indulging in metaphor, she’s a block of marble who is slowly being shaped each time her environment, and those reinforcing it, chip away at her. We’re left with a beautiful and strong woman, but she has to navigate the blunt force of Nanny’s conditioned racial destiny, Jody’s determination to possess her gender, and the muck of poverty - all chisels - in order to achieve autonomy.
Janie is curious about love, but Nanny undermines this pursuit out of a need to protect. Nanny can’t possibly comprehend the possibilities available to Janie: “Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do” (Hurston, 15). She quickly weaponizes race insofar as finding Janie a husband regardless of compatibility or desire. Nanny has been subjugated to a reality of racial domination in the form of slavery, but there’s no reason why Janie has to assimilate to the same constructs. She is more empowered and, as Eve Dunbar suggest, Janie represents the “new negro” – “the vector through which she allowed the readers to the see the modernity of rural blackness” (4). Janie is, as Dunbar suggests, the antidote to the historical pain of slavery – defining her own relationship to race.
Mrs. Turner chisels into Janie’s marble by demonstrating the ugliness with which human nature always tries to wield otherness as a means for exercising authority – authority as it relates to the hierarchy of power politics. Mrs. Turner is, “cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness,” eulogizing this concept that the world is a chicken yard and everyone has a pecking order in it (Hurston, 138).
Janie graduates to womanhood only to find that womanhood has a target on her back. She marries Jody out of love and the promise to be made a wife. Unfortunately, Jody wields the chisel of gender and shapes Janie some more. She is forced to code herself to marital paradigms and restrictions – unable to show her hair (mainly to humor Jody’s possessive jealousies), forgo speaking her mind in public, and learn that “her place is in de home” (Hurston, 41). Jody, like Nanny, begins to slap her and body-shame her. He makes her smaller than livestock and conform to his authority. Jody teachers her the powerful implications of gender, to the degree that when she implicates his infertility and aging body, his power is completely dissolved. Her emasculation of him is an atomic bomb: “Janie had robbed him of his illusion of irresistible maleness that all men cherish, which was terrible” (Hurston, 75). However, even after he is gone, men still hope to reduce her: “Uh woman by herself is uh pitiful thing. Dey needs aid and assistance. God never meant ‘em tuh try tuh stand by theirselves” (Hurston, 86).
Finally, we can look at the third chisel of Janie’s surroundings that shape her – the chisel of poverty. Janie, who has finally found passionate, sexual, and emotional love in Tea Cake follows him to the Everglades where she picks peas in the muck and trades in the clothes of a mayors wife for overalls. Camouflaged among the cattails and workers of the muck, Janie is finally able to laugh with the men and speak her mind. She’s not afraid of putting in the work and happy to be a part of a community outside of her marriage until Tea Cake is killed. She suddenly finds herself on trial for his murder and we see other poor people of color against her. Janie, noticing the white women in pink clothes, asks, “What need had they to leave their richness to come look on Janie in her overalls?” (Hurston, 176). She is accused of her privilege by the very community she was a member of and “felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts. They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks” (Hurston, 176). Suddenly her “coffee-and-cream” complexion is not black enough and only the 12 white men of the jury can save her. Without Tea Cake, the terms and agreements of her belonging to the working class have changed, and she is forced to return to Eatonville full of mourning, but also full of strength. The overalls that she dawns suddenly become a symbol of her new transformation and the poverty that she embraces.
It's clear that Janie’s three marriages really are the framework through which her growth is accelerated from; however, I argue that we could look deeper at the socio-economic conditions through which the people and environments of Janie’s life influence her the most. The legacy of race that Nanny elicits, the patriarchal weight of subservience demanded of women through their gender, and finally the tribalism of the working-class and how quickly that membership can be revoked all chisel away at Janie’s marble. There is an “Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t” that plague characters in Hurston’s novel (Hurston, 138). Yet in the end, despite the damage these social chisels can do, she’s revealed to be a modern actualized woman. She has learned lessons that have fostered in her growth and agency. She is free to be herself and free to bloom.
Works Cited
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. J.B. Lippincott, Inc., 1937
Dunbar, Eve. “What I Learned about Love from Rereading Their Eyes Were Watching God.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 8 June 2017, www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/blog/learned-love-rereading-eyes-watching-god/. Accessed, 10 December 2023.
Essay #9; Systems Reinforcing Systems; 2023
We’ve navigated many texts through a feminist lens that depict women characters confronting patriarchal barriers that have reinforced their oppressions – both ancient and modern. In looking at how women absorb the blows of misogyny, violence, objectification and disqualification I came to notice how systemic prejudices have been built into the very fabric of our society that not only pits women against authoritative men, but against women themselves. Within the pluralism of otherness, I want to consider how classism, racism, and religious fundamentalism (out of the many weapons of otherness society uses to fuel the power of a few) in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House”, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. I argue that the systems utilized in these texts deter a broader sense of female unity, and therefore, support the larger system or patriarchy.
We continue to see how society emboldens political dimensions by assigning blame on other ethnic collectives, religious identities, and class affiliations. Those (almost unilaterally men) who hope to retain power inject hatred and otherness into the veins of society to prevent people from uniting together. These systems are perpetuated generation after generation, nation by nation. If we look at Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House” we see how the poverty of The kelvey’s keeps them ostracized from their peers, yet we learn through Kezia that this behavior is not instinctual, it is learned. The other school children have learned to exclude the Kelvey’s from the prejudice of their well-to-do parents. When Kezia invites the Kelvey’s to play with the doll house, her aunt spits, “" How dare you ask the little Kelveys into the courtyard? You know as well as I do, you're not allowed to talk to them. Run away, children, run away at once. And don't come back again” (Mansfield 6). At my most cynical, I see Kezia growing up to scoff at the poverty of the Kelvey’s. Unfortunately, Aunt Beryl is complicit in the patriarchal network of women condemning the efforts of the poor Mrs. Kelvey, “a spry, hardworking little washerwoman, who went about from house to house by the day” (Mansfield 3). Through classism, we see women hindering the progress of other women.
Similarly, we can look at Angelou’s experience as a servant to a white woman, Mrs. Cullinan, and her attempts to strip Maya’s name of its integrity thus reducing her woman and personhood. Maya imagines the arrogance of, “letting some white woman rename you for her convenience” (Angelou 55). Maya looks for an ally in Miss Gloria, but finds no solidarity as Miss Gloria brushes the racism off: “Don’t mind. Don’t pay that no mind. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words…” (Angelou 55). Through a Jim Crow lens, we obviously see the pathology of racism effortlessly at work, but upon closer examination, I noticed, like Kezia, Maya is among women. She is suffering the cancerous blows of racism that dominate her life, yet unable to find any comfort among the woman around her. The tragedy of Miss Gloria is that she’s older and acknowledges the fatalism of trying to stand up for herself. Maybe she was as angry as Maya at one time? Thankfully, our protagonist gets the last word and shatters the crockery – representing generations of white supremacy finally showing its cracks – but, it’s impossible not to notice a woman defying the odds stacked against her without the help of other women. Patriarchy, is once again showing how its deep roots have infiltrated every system of oppression.
Finally, we can look at Satrapi in her autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis, and how her attempts to liberate her autonomy through western education others her from the other Iranian women who didn’t have the privilege to escape the autocratic theocracy of fundamentalist Islam. Religious oppression has created this vacuum of expression and while other Muslim women thirst for juicy detail of Marjane’s sexual ventures, they are quick to condemn them. Marjane is slut-shamed by women unable to posture as modern women. They ask, “So, what’s the difference between you and a whore???” and Marjane is forced to reconcile her anger by acknowledging that, “to them, I had become a decadent western woman” (Satrapi 270). In Persepolis, the patriarchal agenda condemns western ideologies by imposing religious fundamentalism on everyone, but none as extreme as its women. Marjane, like our other protagonists, is forced to champion her individuality and protest, alone. The regime has forced so much backward structure on femininity that it all but condemns it. Women, so trapped and tired from years of revolution, have largely accepted their cultural exclusion and become complacent. They challenge Marjane’s identity and ostracize her. She toggles between the pride and shame of being Iranian. Through the rejection of woman presenting as self-actualized women, the patriarchy prevails. We see religious systems pit women against women, ultimately fueling the few powerful men at the top.
In conclusion, if we look at these texts as isolated from one another we really only see one system. That system that largely defines its author, establishes the make-up of the larger patriarchal system – this could be class, race, religion, etc. However, what was unearthed for me, was how all these systems make up the connective tissue of how patriarchy plagues women’s judgements of other women. All three texts we’ve explored have commonalities like girlhood adolescence, but we can also see that despite their cultural differences they all deal with vitriol from other women. The patriarchy is subtle and has infected societies foundational systems in every corner of the globe.
Works Cited
1. Mansfield, Katherine. “The Doll’s House”, The Nation and Antheneum, 1922
2. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Random House LLC ,1969
3. Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis. Pantheon, 2004