Something Old, Something New

When Janie is 17 she is betrothed to an old, ugly, white man. She says that she can't even stand sleeping in the same bed because of his pig-like feet. He then asks her to do manual labor, which is expected of a farmer's wife. Janie doesn't want anything to do with that, and when Logan goes off to get a second mule for Janie, she waits by the side of the road. She sees a nicely dressed man walking along the road she doesn't know. She starts talking to him, and after two weeks she runs off with Joe without saying goodbye to Logan.

It is pretty obvious that Janie is unhappy with her marriage to Logan, and she has so many daydreams of a happy marriage she could have. But alas, she is stuck with Logan in a farm house where not many travelers come by. Well, she is stuck with him until Joe comes along.

Although she is unhappy with her current marriage, does she desire more to get out of her marriage with Logan, or get into a marriage with who she thinks will make her happy? The lead up to her marriage with Joe is very abrupt, so it is quite unclear of how much in love they are.

Gender of the Anonymous

Yesterday in our class we started our discussion on Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The book starts off with an anonymous voice that says "Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board." This voice goes on to talk about the difference between men's and women's minds. In our class most people assumed it was a women's voice as it seems as though it has an insight into the female mind, as it talks in more detail about women's thoughts. Even as I was typing that sentence I had to correct errors from me saying "she" instead of "it."

It's interesting how most people read this and assume one gender or another. I guess it is only human to do so, as we often judge people more by appearance than intellect, but there is something that almost doesn't seem right. Yes, the author is a woman and usually it is easier for a women to write in a women's point of view, and the main character is a women, so it is easy to assume that the narrator is also a women, but it never fully tells us one way for another.

In Native Son the narrator's gender is not determined either, but I assumed it was a man because the voice seemed to know what the male characters were thinking much more clearly than the what the women were thinking.

Although it is not necessarily a bad thing to gender the anonymous voice, I find it very  interesting how we are so accustomed to automatically slapping a label on someone.

America

America by Henry Dumas

If an eagle be imprisoned

On the back of a coin

And the coin is tossed into the sky,

That coin will spin,

That coin will flutter,

But the eagle will never fly. 

This is the poem that I read in class last Friday. I had actually chosen another poem to recite, but when Pauline read "We wear the mask" this poem was on the next page. I thought that this poem said so much with so few words. 

I feel like this poem really relates to on of the books we have read. In Invisible Man the narrator struggles with this imprisonment when he gets a job with the brotherhood he feels like he can give speeches freely, but the Brotherhood tells him exactly what he is supposed to say. When the narrator says something that the Brotherhood hasn't approved, he is reprimanded for it. 

It is interesting how Dumas uses the eagle to express imprisonment. Eagles are usually used to symbolize freedom, but here the eagle "will never fly." The title of this work is "America," which confused me at first. I thought maybe it was because the eagle is what is on the back of a quarter, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed that there was a deeper meaning. Americans often feel like we have so many freedoms, and we are very proud to be Americans. "Land of the free and home of the brave" is a common saying, but we are trapped by so many things in our country: race, gender, social standings, just to name a few. 

Did anyone else get another interpretation? I'd love to hear other thoughts