Final Post: Relationships, Education, Body Image, Self-Identity, Progress, and Expression

     After reading all the pieces of literature for this class I found that there are many repetitive themes in all the books and short stories.  That is the themes on relationships, their education, their bodies and how they view them, their self-identity, their progress in life, and how they express themselves.  I'm going to focus on each topic and relate it to a book that expresses that theme the most and then tie it in to other happenings from the other books.
     A theme that is unavoidable in a piece of women's literature is relationships.  Whether they are good, bad, a family relationship, a romantic relationship, or just a relationship between them and other people it is present in women's literature.  One book we have read this semester that focuses on relationships the most is "2 or 3 Things I know for sure" by Dorothy Allsion.  In this book she has a hard time with the relationship between the men the women in her family got involved with.  She struggles to find a reason for why the women in her family are so tough and sympathetic towards the men.  They get used by the men who end up leaving them with a home and family to take care of.  She even quotes in her book, "The women i loved most in the world horrified me.  I did not want to grow up to be them."   She was afraid of what happened to them in their bad relationships would happen to her.  She didn't want to be barefoot and pregnant and supporting everything on her own.  She saw how her aunts, her sisters, and even her own mother choose the wrong men to be around.  She even was raped by someone her mother was in a relationship with.  After everything she experienced with her families relationships she didn't want anything to do with them.  She ended up sleeping around with women and getting into a bad habit and being bitter.  However although this story shows that women have a tough time and not every relationship is great towards the end things start to become more positive.  The book shows the signs of good and positive relationships as well.  Allison ends up with a woman whom she loves and has a son.  She has a happy family.  She also gets in contact with her sister more and begins to have an understanding relationship with her.  Through this piece of women's literature you can see all types of relationships and how all these relationships make who a women is and how she goes through life.  You can also see this in "Push".  Her mother and father were not good supporters.  The sexually, physically, and mentally abused her and made her feel fat, stupid, and ugly.  However, there were people like Ms. Rain and the students at the Each One Teach One that who helped her through everything so she could live a more positive life.
     Education is another important theme in these books.  I noticed that in a lot of these books education really made a difference in how each woman lived their life.  The more a women knew about herself and the world the more she was able to place herself in the world and face her realities.  You see this mostly in the book, "Push".  Precious the main character starts out not being able to read or express herself because of it.  She feels stupid and unable to do the things she wants to do.  When she finally gets into the Each One Teach One to get her G.E.D  she finally is able to put her life together.  She is able to stand up to her mother who mentally, physically, and sexually abused her and didn't stand up for her when her "father" was raping her.  She is able to come to terms with her childhood and come to how she is going to raise her children and live the rest of her life. I can also see this in,  "In the Time of Butterflies".  In this story the girls are well educated.  Especially Minerva who wants to go to college to become a lawyer.  I think without her knowledge of the world around her how would she have had the courage to stand up to Trujillo and stand up for what she believed was right.  
     When it comes to body image I have to use the book, "I Am an Emotional Creature".  I want to use this piece of women's literature because it is a book for young women when this issue is above all others in their lives.  Girls feel insecure and they view their bodies very negatively.  All the poems and short stories are expressing how a girl feels about herself.  They talk about body image as something that is a physical entity but also an emotional entity.  In one of the poems, I am An Emotional creature it says, "I am an emotional creature.  There is a particular way of knowing. It's like the older women somehow forgot. I rejoice that it's still in my body."  Girls are still coming to terms with how they look and how they feel inside.  They are wondering why they are having all these changes happening to their bodies and why it is causing them to be sensitive and more emotional.  You can see this theme carried on in Eve Ensler's, "The Vagina Monologues." You can see how older women have a hard time coming to terms and loving their bodies even after their adolescent years.  In the excerpt, "Because He Liked to Look at it"  You can see a women who is struggling with herself because she feels overweight until one day a man comes along and wants to have sex with her and calls her beautiful.  I think alot
     I think a concern that everyone has not only women is find self-identity.  Who are we?  Is a question that many women ask today and have in the past.  I think we can see this in the poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye's "19 Varieties of Gazelle."  She is a Pakistan-American who struggled to find who she was as a Pakistani and an American.  In this quote,  "There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,a tree with the largest, fattest, sweetest figs in the world."  You can see that she is trying to merge her two surroundings together and find who she is and where she belongs.  She also has a strong theme of 9/11 in her book.  You can see that she has a conflict with who she is around this time period and who others are.  She mentions a guy who just gets out of prison and is ready to start a new life but knows nothing of the attacks.  This guy is trying to find his identity as much as she is trying to hold on to hers.  Another story you find this in is in Danticant's short stories in "Krick?Krack!"  The women who traveled from Haiti to America found it very hard to adjust to a new type of life.  They held onto beliefs from their life before they came to America, but are trying to find where they fit in this new land.  
     I think every women goes through a progression in their lives.  There comes a point in time where we change as human beings and women from experiences we encounter.  I believe "Fun House" shows this theme the most.  She starts off as a little girl who knows that she is a tomboy and that her father is neat and tidy and likes things just so, but as she gets older realizes he was gay and was having affairs with young boys in his class.  She finds this out through life and events that happen to her.  She comes to the realization that she is lesbian and finds out her father was gay.  She also learns small things like a man's anatomy when she helps her father get a certain tool when he was working on a naked dead guy at the funeral home.  Her life just slowly progresses through out the book to meet a realization at the end of who she was and who her father was.  You can also see this in "When the Emperor was Divine."  The young girl and boy because of the experience they had in the internment camps made them change and develop new attitudes towards the world around them.  Many women change and see the world differently do to their lives experiences.
     I believe the theme of expression is the most important.  Without relationships and education we would never learn,  with out a good self-body image and an idea of our self-identities we wouldn't know who we were, and without progression we would never change and create new ideas.  However, without expression we wouldn't be able to share any of this with the world.  I believe the movie with the women in the penitentiary was a good end for the class.  It tied up everything we were trying to tie up at the end with.  The women talked alot about if their words could be heard and what they would want to say.  All the women had stories they wanted to share and messages they wanted to instill on others before it was to late for them like it was for themselves.  One women who was on drugs, became a prostitute, and then killed a 70 year old man because of her resentment towards the man who hurt her in her life showed her feelings in the video.  Their was regret, guilt, and sorrow.  She wanted to share her story so that maybe no one would have to live with the same shadow she is going to live with for the rest of her life.  All these women through the process of bad relationships before prison, to the education they received in prison. Then they formed good relationships.  Then they created a good body and self image for themselves, and they progressed to eventually they wanted to express how they felt about everything that had happened to them; to spread their message to other women out there so it won't happen to them. I think this whole chain is what this class was trying to tie together.  How all of this forms a woman and how this process is evident in each book we read this semester.

The Men and the Purpose for her writing this book

     I believe a lot of the problems not only Allison but the women in her family faced was due to the men in their lives.  She even begins talking about them by saying, "The tragedy of the men in my family was silence, a silence veiled by boasting and joke."  You can see her opinion of the men and how the women never talked about it they just dealt with it.  They were troubled people with bad reputations.  Her uncles went to jail, thy had a lot of women, and were not very free.  They were trapped in trying to be hard-faced and tough men, but they really weren't all like that on the inside.  Was it because of there social class?  Did they not feel like they completely provided for there family?  Then again a lot of the men involved like Allison's dad or her aunts husband leave and don't return and leave the women to grieve.  So maybe some of them do feel like they aren't providing for their families well enough and others don't even try.
     One of the men that Allison goes into to detail with is her uncle.  She says,  "I had woken up to her whispering and shifting on that creaky old sofa, the taint of whiskey and tobacco smoke telling me that someone was there, and the hoarse sobs that followed confusing me, for I had never before heard my uncle cry."  In this excerpt from her book you can see that not all the men in her family were truly bad a lot of them were just victims of a lifestyle that they lived in.  I think this is Allison's way of saying that she didn't hate them and she didn't completely blame all men for what happened to the women in her family.


     I believe there are a lot of reasons why she chose to write this book.  I think one was to come to terms with her life when she was a child to figure out how it all pieced together.  To find blame?  comfort? a reason? Probably all of these things.  You can see by the end of the book there seems to be a calming less angry feeling in her righting I think this is a great writing technique but I think it is more than that.  I think it had to do with her actually trying to figure this all out and you can see where she was having the toughest times voicing what she thought and what really happened.  Another reason why she could have wrote this book is to help people understand that you can't just deal with things.  You have to be who you are and if things are going wrong you need to break the bad cycles.  She did.  She started a family and is very happy.  She could be trying to send a message to everyone that it can be done and to not give up hope.

(Late) The Women

     I think a strong theme in this book is the women in Dorothy Allison's family and how they influenced her to be the woman she is today.  If you look at the picture on page 33 of the women in her family you can see that they all have a kind of scowl on their faces.  They look tough.  They are dressed roughly and unfeminine.  I think this look that they have in this photo is because of the lives they all lived.
  I think a lot of the way that the women lived the way they did is because of the influence of men in their lives.  If you look at Allison's mother she got pregnant as a teenager and the guy left her.  This is a similar story for most of the relatives in her family.  At an early age she learned to just deal with the way men were and to live with it rather than go against the grain.  On page 35 it says, "When she found me once, red-faced and tearful, brooding over rude boys who shouted insults and ran away, she told me to wipe my face and pay no attention."  In this line it could be making a connection to all the men who ran away and neglected there duties as fathers, brothers, and husbands and the way they treated these women when they were still around.  At this  young age Allison is learning to just deal with it.  As a human being there always shows the strains of just dealing with things and that is why the women look so worn and tired in that picture.
     How did this influence Allison's life?  Well she discovered the same kind of life from men.  She was raped by her step-father and her mother till the day she died wouldn't believe it.  She from the moment she was young knew she didn't want to end up like her mother, her aunt, and her relatives.  She says, "The women i loved most in the world horrified me.  I did not want to grow up to be them."
     I think a lot of this made her not want to love a man.  She didn't want to be used by a man so she fell in love with a woman.  She gained masculine traits to become strong.
     Although she tried to run away from the hurt men caused in her family she was already affected by a young age because of the rape.  You can tell because she went through a long process of coming to terms with it.  She slept with many women and was used by them.  Is this no different then the women in her family being treated badly by men?  However, I do find that she did do something different then the rest, and that is she turned her life around.  She was able to find happiness. This is is shown in  the picture of all the scowling women in contrast to her family photo with her son and partner is distinctly noticeable.  In her family photo she looks younger and happier then she ever did in most of the photos. She was able to piece it all together to build a desirable life for her and her family.

Last Scene in The Shawl

     I believe the last scene in the book is Rosa letting go.  I think it is very symbolic how she slowly moves on.  First she calls Stella who was part of her past before the camps and during and after.  I think this is symbolic because she is the first person she had through this ordeal and the first person she calls up.  Then she has a vision of Magda as a young teenage girl.  This is symbolic because Magda's death at a young age in the concentration camps had a huge impact on Rosa throughout her life.  The last stage of letting go is the interruption into the present reality.  This is when she gets a call from the receptionist saying a Mr. Persky was there to see her.
     When she calls Stella she does it to spark Magda's image in her brain.  You can tell from this conversation however that maybe Rosa's feelings towards Stella are changing a little.  Before all we heard was how horrible she thought Stella was and how cold she was.  Now you can see her more or less talking to her like a friend or companion.  For example on page 64, "In that case you come here," Rosa said.  "Oh my God, I can't afford it.  You talk like I'm a millionaire.  What would I do down there?"  "I don't like it alone.  A man stole my underwear."  "Your what?" Stella squeaked.""  This exchange between Stella and Rosa shows that maybe Rosa is lonely and wants Stella's company although she is trying to produce Magda from this conversation and almost seems that there may have been a need for Stella too.  You can also see after this quote that Stella also doesn't mind her coming back and caring for her aunt.
     After she hangs up the phone she envisions Magda as a young teen.   On page 65 it says, "And also she was always a little suspicious of Magda, because of the other strain, whatever it was, that ran in her.  Rosa herself was not truly suspicious, but Stella was, and that induced perplexity in Rosa."  You can see here that Rosa is beginning to listen to what people are saying especially Stella.  This is a start for her considering she wasn't listening at all.  Now the "suspicion" or thought of letting go of the past is sinking in and is helping her on the way to recovery.
     The last thing that points that she is starting to let go is the scene the receptionist is calling up to her to let her know Mr. Persky is down stairs and would like to see her.  Rosa Responds in these last lines, "'He's used to crazy women, so let him come up' Rosa told the Cuban.  She took the shawl off the phone.  Magda was not there.  Shy, she ran from Persky.  Magda was away."  Although you can clearly see that she is not completely over everything because it says that Magda just was away rather than gone, but you can see that reality or present reality is starting to sink in.  Whether it is because of finally just realizing or Mr. Persky entering her life it has made an effect.  She is starting to except an outsider into her life and she isn't so isolated anymore.  There is definitely a healing feeling at the end of this book.