Milan Tomic Latin American Lit Professor Owens 22 Oct 2014 Essay #1 It is interesting to see the development of an identity for Latin American Literature as we read stories that truly start from the beginning of the settling of the Americas. Two stories that stand out to me are "An Old Women Remembers" and "The Squatter And The Don" in which they share a common theme of pride and empowerment of women, something rarely seen from writings in this era. Based on what we know of the times when both pieces were written, it is safe to say that the role expected of women is that of housekeeper, cook, and bearer of children. This notion at the time was probably the general consensus of about ninety nine percent of the male population, yet in both stories we see female characters with a very strong sense of pride and identity of their own. On the surface of Eulalia Perez's memoire "An Old Women Remembers" one would think that she is simply a women who fits the mold of the roles of women during that time.
Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838-1923), born in Cuba during a temporary residence of her American parents on the island. She traveled widely in her early years and eventually settled in the Boston area, where she studied American archeology and ethnology at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. It was out of intense concern for the welfare and rights of the American Indian that she began her scientific studies of them. Although she was eventually to gain great and well-merited recognition as a scholar, the recommendations in behalf of American Indians that she made in the name of anthropological authority suffered from an uncritical commitment to benevolent philosophies of the nineteenth century. The policy she advocated was based on the assumption that it was both inevitable and desirable for the Indians to be assimilated into white society and for their tribal culture to be rapidly destroyed.
So both slaves escape by any means necessary, hiding, revolt, and telling of their story. Jacobs began her narrative around 1853, after she had lived as a fugitive slave in the North for ten years. She began working privately on her narrative not long after Cornelia Grinnell Willis purchased her freedom and gave her secure employment as a domestic servant in New York City. Jacobs finish her narrative around four years later but was not published until four years later. Her narrative reflects a sentimental domestic novel, written for women that stressed home, family.
Poe’s Genre Crossing: From Domesticity to Detection BONITA RHOADS cholarship of the past forty years has repeatedly demonstrated that domesticity emerged as a pervasive cultural ideology in nineteenthcentury America, promoting the feminized household as a spiritual retreat from the instrumental relations of the marketplace. “Domesticity constitutes an alternative to, and escape from, the masculine economic order,” Gillian Brown contended in 1990, recapitulating the groundbreaking studies published in the 1970s and 1980s.1 But despite all its manifest resistance to capitalism, domestic ideology and the popular fiction associated with it have also been prominently linked to consumerism. In her classic 1977 book, The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas leveled a notoriously harsh indictment against domestic ideology as the origin of mass culture. More recently, in Sentimental Materialism, Lori Merish has reexamined Douglas’s argument, offering a more even-handed consideration of the conflicted orientations and complex intellectual history by which domesticity contested the market while nevertheless supplying a crucial logic for consumerism.2 Such internal contradictions have caused a number of critics to conclude that domestic ideology was too aligned with the public sphere to maintain its credibility as a moral counterpoint to industrial society. “A persistent and fundamental paradox of American domesticity,” in Kathleen McHugh’s words, is that “[while] it was constructed ideologically from the beginning as a resistant discourse to market capitalism its resistance functioned conservatively, as an accommodation with or amelioration of threatening market forces rather than a direct contestation of them.” Yet, according to Mary P. Ryan, domesticity’s concessions to commercial culture were not static but progressive.
Andrea Levy’s ‘Small Island’ is a novel based around four main characters and their relationships from first person shifting perspectives, consisting of two settings in London and Jamaica. The story is set against the backdrop The Windrush Generation in which Afro-Caribbean’s such as Hortense and Gilbert travel to England to rebuild Britain in a period of white supremacy after the Second World War. Chapter 5 marks the beginning of Hortense and Gilbert’s odd romance, lifting the gloom cast by Michael Robert’s earlier fall from grace and recent disappearance through the humour of the character’s unromantic meeting as a couple who will eventually marry. Levy’s use of immediate past tense, first person approach creates the sense of memory and flashback “The moment I saw him”. By opening the chapter on the flashback elements of the event, the reader is aware that the meeting of Gilbert and Hortense was a significant occurrence in the journey of both characters and this foreshadows their marriage “Yelling came in vibrations through a protective chest”.
Finally, Kingston shares her hardships of adjusting into the role of a Chinese-American woman in her memoir, The Woman Warrior. Race: -Drown: Junior, born and spent his early childhood in the Dominican Republic. - Language: Diaz uses Spanish words
These events played an important role on the writing of the novel, however there were also many other values, ideas and attitudes of the time that were influential on the novel and its characters. At the close of the 18th century Jane Austen wrote a novel titled Pride and Prejudice, this novel would be read by millions and become one of the 'must read' books all the way though to the 21st century. When this novel was written England was expanding its empire, the French Revolution was coming to a close and Mary Wollstonecraft was publishing books on the equality of the sexes. These events are not necessarily mentioned in the novel as such, however they would have certainty influenced Jane Austen and her views, attitudes and ideas. These historical events changed people's views and attitudes towards certain parts of their life, this included marriage, love, social class and women in general.
The young woman I first want to discuss is Phyllis Wheatley, an African slave writing poetry in English. “If Wheatley stood for anything, it was the creed that culture, was, and could be, the equal possession of all humanity. It was a lesson she was swift to teach, and that we have been slow to learn” Born in Senegal, Africa in 1753, Wheatley was a slave child of seven or eight and sold to John and Susanna Wheatley in Boston on July 11, 1761. Her first name was derived from the ship that carried her to American, The Phyllis. During her
A Small Place A Small Place is a memoir published in 1988 by Jamaica Kincaid. The work is an indictment of the Antiguan government, the tourist industry and Antigua's British colonial legacy. After experiencing a frustrating and complex childhood, Jamaica Kincaid expresses her opinions about the life of Antigua, a small island, in her book, "A Small Place." Kincaid was born in Antigua and lived there until age 16, when she then moved to the United States. Reflecting back to her childhood, Kincaid shares her ideas about the American and European inhabitants.
The Intimate Desires of Aphra Behn “The life she led would have been extraordinary in any age, but for a woman of the seventeenth century not born to fortune or position, it was nearly unheard of.” —Angeline Goreau Aphra Behn was an unconventional woman. Virginia Woolf says it best: “All women together should let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn…for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Behn, unlike her father and many others, survived the perilous voyage to the West Indies. Upon return to England, Behn became and served as a spy for Charles II from which she incurred insurmountable debt, and was thrown into debtor’s prison. Afterwards, Aphra Behn worked in defense of women’s rights as a political activist, sexual pioneer, and writer. Producing seventeen plays and fourteen novels, several collections of poetry and translations, Behn is known as the first woman to earn her living as an author.