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ENG45C, public confidence vs private vulnerability -- curated social roles…

- - - - In the early 20th century, Harlem was the center of Black cultural expression and racial struggle. Through his poetry, Hughes represents how oppressed people can create identity through music, community, and political imagination.
        
        The Weary Blues - A lone blues musician performs on Lenox Avenue, singing with exhaustion but also with soul. This moment shows how music becomes a form of survival and self-definition in a society structured by racism.
        
        The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain - Hughes argues that Black artists must embrace their won culture and art and experiences instead of trying to imitate white artists. He says that their imitation is an example of internalized racism and shame and that they should strive to create authentic Black art.
        
        “Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America…the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world.”
        
        The musician plays “with his ebony hands” and sings of deep fatigue, which embodies the “weariness in a white world” that Hughes talks about in the essay.
        
        But his music is also an act of resistance, a “tom-tom of revolt.”
        
        Tradition and the Individual Talent -
        
        argues that identity is formed through cultural inheritance
        
        that individuals belong to a long historical lineage that shapes their voice and that that shaping is important to their artistic identity
        
        asks questions about who gets to define tradition and which historical lineages should continue as tradition through writing
        
        The Negro Speaks of Rivers
        "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
        
        this quote references the idea of deep tradition, of a shared identity over time, a river rushing over the same place over and over again making its mark in the earth
        
        at the same time, rivers change and erode, while it is the same river, the shape may be different and it may intereac twith the alnd around it differently. chagne and growth are good and normal as long as identity remains intact
        
        also, even though its the same river, it's never the same water. this lends itself to the idea that many people can contribute to the same tradition and idea and lend their voices to the same ideas
        
        The idea of reclaiming identity and narrative is also present in H.D.'s Eurydice where Eurydice is able to reclaim her voice and challenge dominant male narratives. It mirrors colonized people reclaiming suppressed stories as it shows identity being rebuilt through speaking against historical oppression
        
        Harlem (A Dream Deferred) - Hughes lists what happens to a dream when a community is held back: it sags, festers, or explodes. The poem reflects how the city holds both possibility and pressure. He shapes racial identity through frustration and resilience.
        
        Let America Be America Again - Hughes reimagines America through the voices of the oppressed: the poor people, the immigrants, the Black worker. He calls out the gap between national myth and lived reality, interogating the "American Dream." This transforms the city into a political space where marginalized voices demand recognition.
    - - Easter, 1916 - Yeats shows the creation of the modern Irish identity through the Easter uprising to represent how ordinary people can become symbolic and make a difference through sacrifice. He shows how colonial rule forces crises of identity and people must redefine themselves through political struggle. He emphasizes both the strength and the trauma that results from such a reshaping.
        
        "A terrible beauty is born"
        
        Yeats repeats this phrase to show that national identity is forged through both suffering and transformation
        
        Yeats feels both pride and sadness, something good is coming from something tragic
        
        the new ireland is "born" through death and destruction
        
        also general idea of rebirth -- of rising from the ashes
- - - - Mrs Dalloway - London is like a stage where Clarissa has to perform the identity that is expected of her. She must be an elegant hostess, ideal wife, and well-mannered upper class woman. Her interior thoughts reveal that her inner self doesn't always align with her outer self, pointing to her contradictions, insecurities, and longings.
        
        performance vs authenticity
        
        urban sociability
        
        the gaze of others shapes the self
        
        Clarissa's identity forms through London's rhythms. Her walk through Bond street represents the connection between her and all the people around her. Through free and indirect discourse, Woolf connects all of the characters.
        
        In contrast, Bartleby the Scrivener is an example of breaking away from social roles. The ease with which Bartleby exposes the fragility of social roles (specifically within an office culture, though it's a microcosm of society) reveals how arbitrary they are
      - The Dead - Identity surfaces at the annual holiday dinner in Dublin. Gabriel delivers a speech to everyone with great confidence, before learning that his wife Gretta once loved Michael Furey very deeply before she ever loved him.
        
        His interactions with the other characters reveal how is out of touch with reality and less socially aware than he thought.
        
        Miss Ivors: a journalist who confronts Gabriel about writing for a West Briton paper. They have a heated debate that is tied to their identities.
        
        Lily: the caretakers young daughter who becomes offended when Gabriel asks if she will be marrying soon, revealing a more progressive world that Gabriel is not a part of
        
        "'O, then,' said Gabriel gaily, 'I suppose we’ll be going to your wedding one of these
        fine days with your young man, eh?'
        The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:
        'The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.'
        Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without looking at her,
        kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his muffler at his patent-leather shoes.
        He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards
        even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and
        on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt
        rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes...."
        
        Lily’s reaction surprises Gabriel, and it shows that his polite small talk does not fit the world she lives in and that he is an outsider in a world he thought he understood
        
        Gabriel immediately feels embarrassed, which shows how unsure he really is beneath his confident tone. The fact that he feels immediately confident that he has messed up rather than think that Lily is wrong or overreacting emphasizes his insecurity and lack of self confidence in social situations
        
        The narration suddenly shifts to focus on his appearance, which makes it clear that Gabriel suddenly becomes very aware of how he looks and the way he is percieved by others.
        
        The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is about a middle aged man who is paralyzed by indecision, and like Gabriel is self-conscious and afraid of judment
        
        His glasses sort of hide eyes, suggesting that he uses his polished & educated appearance to cover up his insecurity
        
        this foreshadows when Gabriel realizes he has misunderstood the people around him, especially Gretta
      - The Man of the Crowd - The narrator observes the London crowd from a café window, categorizing the people he sees by class, profession, gender, etc. He then follows the "man of the crowd" all night, obsessed with him because he cannot understand him.
        
        the old man moves thorugh different social districts -- slums, markets, arcades -- never stopping nor belonging
        
        invisibility and unknowability
        
        anxiety of interpretation
      - In a Station of the Metro - In the busy city, individual people blend together into one quick image. The faces aren’t clearly separate, they appear like an “apparition,” showing how personal identity becomes blurry in a crowd.
        
        "The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
        Petals on a wet, black bough."
        
        Imagism!
        
        extremely short
        
        no verbs
        
        a feeling of timelessness
        
        a sense that the two images appear instantly, almost like a flash
        
        a snapshot-like quality, frozen in time
        
        no explanations
        
        no extra words
    - - Their Eyes Were Watching God - Janie's sense of self and her idea of her place in the world is developed through her varying marriages and their dynamics
        
        Logan's farm labor expectations
        
        Joe Starks' strict control over her speech
        
        Tea Cake's companionship and laughter (but also manipulation)
        
        gender roles
      - The Turn of the Screw - The governess is obsessed with domestic power and craves acceptance from the children. She tries to embody moral authority and has some success in this via her manipulation of Mrs. Grose.
        
        she has some authority because she can read and communicate where Grose cannot
        
        Her belief that she knows best and can best manage a household is ultimately her downfall and causes pain to the children. Although the ultimate cause of Miles' death is ambiguous, it can be argued that the ghosts aren't real and that the governess kills him, blinded by her need to "save" him.
        
        domesticity as performance
        
        "No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!"
        
        the fact that she feels both lost and in control shows her desire to guide the situation even though she barely knows what is happening
        
        Seeing herself as the captain shows her wish to be heroic, which may come more from her fantasies about impressing those around her or even feeling good about her superiority than from the reality of the situation.
        
        Her hope and excitement replace her fear, mostly because she is charmed by Flora and wants to believe she can succeed in this new role.
        
        She flatters herself!
        
        Both the narrator of the man of the crowd and the governness think they know and understand more than they actually do and feel superior. The former flatters himself at the beginning of the narrative by indulging in classifying others but ultimately realizes he doesn't understand the city as much as he originally thought. The latter descends slowly into madness and loses the faith and affection of those around her as she tries to alter reality to cling to her internal desires.
    - - Things Fall Apart - Okonkwo's identity is motivated through a hatred of his father's weakness and a desire to be strong and masculine. This is built through yam farming, wrestling, titles, rituals, and ancestral tradition. Okonkwo is able to build a name for himself and initially has status before he gets carried away and kills multiple people
        
        Okonkwo's connection to the Igbo traditions and cultures are more harmful and separate from most of the members of his tribe. While Okonkwo may not be able to function well within the social norms of his society, others do. Yet their ability to self govern is denied by colonial rule.
        
        Tradition vs Colonial Intrusion Okonkwo's eldest and most prominent son is Nwoye who Okonkwo views as feminine and week. He is mean to Nwoye. They briefly become closer when their family adopts Ikemefuna as Nwoye is influenced to act more traditionally masculine. However, because of a decree by a Umuofia village oracle, Ikemefuna must be killed. His death pushes Nwoye who has already been somewhat disillusioned with his culture even farther away. As a result, he is very susceptible to the influence of Christian colonists.
        
        Ultimately, the colonists are uninterested in understanding the social structures of any of the Igbo people for any reason that might foster connection or shared growth. There is no desire for true communication, sharing of ideas, or beneficial discourse.
        
        “The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details s cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of the man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.”
        
        The Commissioner imagines himself through a social performance of authority
        
        He sees the Igbo not as people, but as a social group he must manage, classify, and pacify
        
        He rewrites Igbo life into a colonial narrative, which replaces their real traditions with a false social identity created by the empire
        
        Okonkwo’s suicide becomes a social symbol to him, not a personal tragedy.
- - - - The Sound and the Fury - The narration is divided among Caddy's three brothers and an omniscient narrator. This division fragments the narrative on its own, but the narrations from the boys are also fractured across different minds, each with their own broken timeline and emotional wounds.
        
        Benjy’s section: pure sense impressions (sound, color), showing pre-logical consciousness, absolutely no sense of time, everything happening at once, very objective
        
        Quentin’s section: his obsession with time symbolized when he breaks his watch, very subjective, full of judgments
        
        Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot also experience a broken sense of time
        
        Their endless waiting breaks their days into meaningless pieces making identity feeling stuck instead of whole. They feel disconnected and fragmented from reality as they are just waiting, identities floating without purpose nor structure
        
        Jason’s section: rage, anxiety, and cynicism as a fragmented moral center
        
        Dilsey’s endurance: a stabilizing force within chaosIdeas:
        
        subjective time
        
        memory overwhelming the present
        
        fractured family identity
      - Sea Rose Reexamines beauty, contrasting the "harsh" "meagre" and "sparse" sea rose with the flawless pampered rose.
        
        shows how identity can be shaped through struggle & that brokenness and roughness can reveal a different kind of strength which challenges traditional ideas of value, perfection, and beauty
    - - The Second Coming - Details the collapse of Western civilization after WWI, using the Christian idea of rebirth (the second coming of Jesus) to explain the uncertain birth of a new brutal age. It depicts chaos, anarchy, the loss of moral order, and general destruction and pandemonium
        
        "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"
        
        cultural collapse
        
        apocalyptic anxiety
        
        identity unsettled by global crisis
        
        fragmentation of civilization
        
        Spring and All explores the slow emergence of spring from winter's desolation, also exploring ideas of rebirth - a change of identity & place
      - Sailing to Byzantium - The speaker rejects his aging body and longs to escape into art, revealing estrangement from physical self and natural life due to a changing world that he can't keep up with.
        
        "That is no country for old men"
        
        The Lake Isle of Innisfree
        
        the speaker yearns for a place they are no longer a part of
        
        estrangement through nostalgia
        
        a loss of the world that was once known and cherished
        
        psychological exile
        
        "I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
        While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey"
        
        The speaker’s mind is divided between where he is (the city) and where he wants to be (the lake)
        
        He carries the sound of Innisfree “in the deep heart’s core,” showing how his inner world doesn’t match his outer reality.
        
        The poem shows a person living in two places at once. it creates a fragmented sense of identity & world - one part trapped in modern life, the other escaping into memory or imagination