A : AMERICAN LITERATURE
MODULE 1
POETRY:
I HEAR AMERICA SINGING-WALT WHITMAN
ANECDOTE OF THE JAR-WALLACE STEVENS
EDGE-SYLVIA PLATH
MOTHER TO SON-LANGSTON HUGHES
MODULE 2
DRAMA:
DEATH OF A SALESMAN-ARTHUR MILLER
SHORT STORY:
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER-EDGAR
ALLAN POE
BARN BURNING-WILLIAM FAULKNER
B : POST COLONIALISM
MODULE 3
POETRY:
THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF ME-MARGRET
ATWOOD
THE EMIGRANTS-KAMAU BRAITHWAITE
HOUSE OF A THOUSAND DOORS-MEENA
ALEXANDER
THE MYSTIC DRUM-GABRIEL OKARA
AFRICA-DAVID DIOP
MODULE 4
DRAMA:
HARVEST-MANJULA PATHMANABHAN FICTION:
KILLING TIME-NASIBU MWANUKUZI
A
SCARF-CAROLD SHIELDS
AMERICAN LITERATURE
MODULE I: POETRY
I HEAR AMERICA SINGING
About the Poet:
Walt Whitman is
a famous American poet. He was a prophet of democracy. Whitman is considered as
the father of free verse. Walt Whitman is a typical American poet. He always
breaks away from the tradition and creates a new trial.
Theme of the poem :
Whitman
celebrates the freedom of the individual and the freedom enjoyed in the United
States.
Summary :
The poem underscores Whitman’s basic
attitude towards America ,which is part of
his ideal human life. The American nation has based its faith on the
creativeness of labour which is glorified
in the poem. The catalogue of craftsmen covers not only the length and
breadth of the
American continent but also the
large and varied field of American achievement. This poem expresses Whitman’s
love of America-its vitality, variety and the massive achievement which is the outcome of the creative endeavor
of its entire people. It also illustrates Whitman’s technique of using
catalogues consisting of a list of people.
The poet hears the varied carols of all
the people who contribute to the life and culture of America. The mechanic, the
carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the shoe maker and the wood cutter all join
in the chorus of the nation. The singing of the mother, the wife and the girl
at work expresses their joy and their feeling of fruition. They are highly
individualistic men and women. Each person sings ‘what belongs to him or her
and to none else.’ At night young men sing loud
‘melodious ‘ songs. All of the workers mentioned are that
of the labour class, they do manual labour
not desk work. Most likely they
all ‘sing’ because the work they do causes some sort of sound. Whitman is
emphasising that each man can have pride in what he does, even if he doesn’t
make a lot of money .Each one is important to contribute to the strength of
this country.
He recognises the value of women’s work. Whitman shows the value of work
in the American society.
This poem
elucidates that an individual had a particular role to play on the society in
which he\she thrives. He encourages
industry in America to be heard as something pleasant ,as a chorus of many
songs. The poet decides to glorify and
celebrate work as well as a perception of nationalism. Whitman is celebrating
the greatness of America by celebrating the
greatness of its individuals. The
democratic nature of Whitman’s poetry is reflected by his subject matter .He
celebrates mechanics, carpenter s, masons, mothers-the type of people usually
not discussed in poems. For Whitman, it is the individual freedom that allows
him to be great.
Literary terms used in this poem
include rhythm, synecdoche, metaphor, repetition, and imagery.
1.
Rhyme Scheme -
There is no rhyme scheme. Whitman is the father of free verse.
2.
Rhythm and Meter-
There is no metrical pattern. He does use repetition, however, to create
rhythm.
3.
Synecdoche -
Of all the "I Hear America Singing" literary terms, none makes its
mark more strongly than synecdoche. "America" in line 1 represents
individual Americans, more specifically, workers. Each line of the poem is an
example of synecdoche (a special type of metaphor where the parts equal the
whole or the whole equals the parts). Whitman is celebrating the greatness of
America by celebration ,the greatness of its individuals.
4.
Word Choice -
"Carols" in line 1 is a connotatively charged word. It is most often associated
with holy songs about Christmas. There is no other way to celebrate individuals
and the physical body than connecting it with the physical manifestation of God
himself.
5.
Metaphor -
the sounds and actions of laborers working is compared to music. Note that all
the jobs described by Whitman require physical effort.
6.
Repetition -
The repetition of "the" in the final seven lines help create rhythm
much in the same way the repetition of worker’s actions establish a work
rhythm.
7.
The democratic nature of Whitman's poetry is reflected
by his subject matter. He celebrates mechanics, carpenters, masons,
mothers--the type of people usually not discussed in poems. For Whitman, it is
the individual who matters and the individual freedom that allows him to be great--"Each
singing what belongs to her"--that matters.
8.
Theme: Whitman's poem celebrates the individuals who
make America great and the right to individual liberty that makes it possible.
QUESTIONS
1. Who is considered as the father of ‘free verse’?
2. What is the title of the poem written by Walt Whitman?
3.
What is the theme of the poem ‘I hear America singing’?
4.
What kind of singing is heard by Whiteman?
5.
What is the poet’s attitude towards America?
6.
Who are the singers in the poem ‘I hear America
singing’?
7.
Who are the women singing in Whiteman’s poem? 8. What
is the purpose behind their singing?
9.
What is the significance of the title poem ‘I hear
America singing’?
10. How
does Whiteman celebrate the greatness of America?
ANECDOTE OF THE JAR
Wallace Stevens
About the Poet
Wallace
Stevens is one of America's most respected poets. He was a master
stylist, employing an
extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he
was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry
as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality.
Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens
was sometimes considered a willfully difficult poet. But he was also
acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that
reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary
critic Harold Bloom called him "the best and most representative American
poet of our time."
THEME OF THE POEM
The poem is about a single subject –the
relation between imagination and reality. His view is that it is the man who
imposes some kind of order upon nature through his artistic creation (jar). In
many of the poems he tries to resolve the conflict between reality and imagination
as it appeared to him. Ultimately, he
found that reality is indispensable to a poet while composing verses, but his
imagination has the right to play upon reality and even transform it when
necessary. The idea is that art which is the product of imagination can impose
order upon a chaotic state of affairs. But Steven’s modernist austerity nakedly
reveals that his theme is
power. In an American context the
poem engages with Emerson's Transcendentalist emphasis on the possessive power
of the eye.
ANALYSIS OF THE POEM
The poem celebrates a moment of
aesthetic triumph. The poet transfers his own imaginative activity to an
inhuman medium-jar. It serves as an extension of the poet’s own drive to order,
but it achieves dominion over the chaotic wilderness precisely because it is
inanimate.
The jar in Tennessee represents a
purely formal principle of order and this kind of order cannot satisfy the
deepest needs of Stevens’ imagination. The jar is not placed in Tennessee, on
the hills of Tennessee. The jar is round upon a rounded piece of ground, a
hill. Hills are calmer and softer than the mountains. We can imagine that this
jar is sitting perfectly on the crust of the hill. The jar is looking down upon
everything around it and it is affecting the world around it. There is a lot of
wilderness around the place where the jar is placed. This place is slovenly
unclean and unmaintained. As the jar is placed on the hill, we can imagine that
the crust of that hill is bare and grey. The wilderness-the trees, vines, birds,
shrunk and rabbits around the hill are being raised up to the hill.
There is
something man made in the wilderness now, tarnishing its purity. It could also
be a statement about how men and manmade objects often overtake the wild and
the natural. Being placed on the top of a hill the jar gives an apex of human
purpose through nature. But the jar asserts authority even more through the
implied design of its own rotundity. It is the design of a created object
embodying a human, cultural purpose. "Anecdote of a Jar" is a
metaphor about the magnetic power of mind and art to order a void (and the
void). Stress is laid upon its nonnaturalness to accentuate the crucial power
of artistic and thus human purpose. Art ( mind ) governs its antithesis,
nature—"It took dominion everywhere," even, indeed, especially, in a
noncivilized, non-human place.
QUESTIONS
1.
What does the jar symbolize?
2.
The jar in Tennessee represents a purely formal
principle of order. Do you agree? Justify your answer.
3.
Give a critical analysis of Stevens’ poem ‘Anecdote of the Jar’.
EDGE
Sylvia Plath About the
poet:
Sylvia
Plath was
an American poet, novelist,
and short story writer.
Known primarily for her poetry,
Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The book's
protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is a bright, ambitious student at Smith College
who begins to experience a mental breakdown while interning for a fashion
magazine in New York. The plot parallels Plath's experience interning at Mademoiselle magazine and subsequent
mental breakdown and suicide attempt.
Along with Anne
Sexton, Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry
initiated by Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass. Despite her remarkable artistic,
academic, and social success at Smith, Plath suffered from severe depression
and underwent a period of psychiatric hospitalization. She graduated from Smith
with highest honours in 1955 and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, in
England, on a Fulbright fellowship. Here she met and married the English poet
Ted Hughes in 1956. For the following two years she was an instructor in
English at Smith College.
In 1960, shortly
after Plath and Hughes returned to England from America, her first collection
of poems appeared as The Colossus.
She also gave birth to a daughter, Frieda Rebecca Hughes’ and Plath’s son,
Nicholas Farrar, was born in 1962.
Plath took her
own life on the morning of February 11, 1963. Leaving out bread and milk, she
completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with
"wet towels and cloths." Plath then placed her head in the oven while
the gas was turned on. Analysis
Plath's poetry was considered as the first
and best examples of "confrontational" and "confessional"
poetry of her era. Such poetry takes real life events for the poem's metaphor.
Poets often used this tool to "confront" real and imagined
characters. Plath’s most famous poem,
"Daddy" is a
confrontational poem that directly "confronts" Plath's anger,
sadness, and love for her father as he died as a result from taking proper care
of his treatable medical condition. When you apply Plath's confrontational
style to the Edge, it suggests that the poetess had considered taking the lives
of her children along with her own. The ending of the poem refers to the
children being "folded" back into the flower as "petals"
and says "we have come so far, it is over." With these lines, Plath
alludes to the idea that life is a journey and death is the reward at the end
of the journey, not just for herself; but for her children as well.
No one will ever
know what Plath's true intentions were, but at the time of her death, she took
considerable care to prevent her children being exposed to the fumes by
stuffing towels below the doors and leaving milk at her children's bedsides.
Despite her tragic death, Plath left behind a legacy of love for her children
in her poetry. Sylvia Plath wrote the poem "Edge" six days prior to
committing suicide on 11th day of February1963 (Alexander 2). The poem is
alleged to be the author's last work. The form bears an exciting feature. It
has ten stanzas, with each having only two lines, seized in an enjambment. The
second line of every stanza is at all times
half of the building and
denotation of the first line of the subsequent stanza. Therefore, the break of
verse is also an edge linking the stanzas, which forms an additional
equivalence between form and substance of the poem. The sentences are only
concluded once they traverse the edge amid the two stanzas, and character in
this piece of literature only appears to discover calm and
"achievement" when crossing an edge. In the most common
interpretations, this edge is referred to as the one occurring between living
and dying. This poem does not pursue a specific rhyme scheme. It has various
remarkable inner rhymes or assonant constructions such as child-coiled,
sweet-bleed, toga-over, flows-scrolls, and rose-close. These terms do not
essentially rhyme in the stern sense but they put in to the tranquil tone of
this piece of literature and make stronger the plentiful images given. Two
common literary devices, that is metaphor and metonymy will be examined, and
afterward discover how they have been used in the 'Edge'.
“Edge”
is a short poem in free verse; its twenty lines are divided into ten couplet
stanzas.
The title suggests a border,
perhaps between life and death. One of the last two poems written by Sylvia
Plath before her suicide, “Edge” is a meditation on the death of a woman.
Written in the third person, the poem may give the impression of offering a
detached judgment of the dead woman. This point of view usually suggests a less
subjective perspective than the first person. The apparently objective imagery
of the poem, however, disguises a high degree of subjectivity on the part of
the poet.
“Edge” begins with
an implied thesis: A woman is “perfected” by death. It is not difficult to see
at least three ways in which the woman has been “perfected.” To “perfect” means
to complete, to master, or to make flawless. While literally true that the
woman has completed her life, “perfected” also suggests that the woman has
mastered womanhood and has been made flawless through her death. These notions
of completion, mastery, and achieved excellence are linked to death in the
brief second line, “Her dead,” which provides an approximate rhyme with the
first line. The second stanza notes “the smile of accomplishment” that adorns
the dead body, suggesting that the woman is pleased by the perfection she has
achieved. The poet then hints that the woman has achieved death through
suicide. The “Greek necessity” that one imagines flowing “in the scrolls of her
toga” strongly suggests the ritual suicides demanded of disgraced individuals
in the classical world. Although most readers are familiar with the
self-inflicted death by hemlock of the Greek philosopher Socrates, ritual
suicide (like the toga) is actually associated with imperial Rome.
Nevertheless, Plath is able to allude to her own writing through the clever
description of the folds of the toga as “scrolls.” The third and fourth stanzas
explain the meaning of the woman’s bare feet. They have taken her the length of
her life with all its obstacles, but now
“it is over.” The sense of relief at
journey’s end is apparent. A new and ominous element is introduced in the fifth
stanza. Dead children, presumably the woman’s own children, are described as
white serpents. Each is coiled before a small “pitcher of milk,” which is “now
empty.” Apparently, the children have each drunk the milk and coiled, fetus
like, at each pitcher;
they are pale, or white, with
death. One must consider the possibility that the children have been poisoned
by their mother. The sixth through eighth stanzas confirm this suspicion. The
woman has “folded/ them back into her body.” She is their mother, and she has
taken her children with her into death. The first line of the poem, “The woman
is perfected,” now takes on yet another meaning: She becomes whole or complete
as all the life that went forth from her is returned to her in death. The poet
defends the murder of the children as the mere closing of a flower at the
approach of night. The rose draws in its petals (as the mother draws in her
children) when the chill of the evening (or, in the case of the woman, death)
descends upon the garden. The sensual but ghastly image of the night as a
many-throated flower that “bleeds” its odors transforms the traditional
literary meaning of flowers and gardens as emblems of love into omens of death.
From the lush imagery of the garden at nightfall, the ninth stanza turns to the
stark moon of the night sky. The poet imagines the moon’s view of the grisly
tableau of the dead bodies of mother and children. Like a nun in a white cowl,
the moon in “her hood of bone” surveys the scene without sadness. The final
stanza of the poem explains the moon’s indifference: “She is used to this sort
of thing.” The dead woman has reenacted an ancient tragedy that the moon has
witnessed over and over again. Further, the poem concludes with the hint that
the moon bears some responsibility for the deaths. The moon’s “blacks crackle
and drag.” - effect of the moon on the earth (dragging the oceans back and
forth across the planet in tides) and on the menses of women account for the
final verb. “Crackle,” however, suggests something more like sunspots, casting
interference and static into the atmosphere and, perhaps, troubling
individuals. Such a relationship between the moon and human behavior is
acknowledged in folklore (the werewolf is transformed under the light of a full
moon) and even in our vocabulary (“lunatic” derives from the same root as
“lunar”).
The moon, it is implied, may have influenced the terrible
events that “she” then observes impassively.
Themes and Meanings
Written
only six days before the author’s suicide, “Edge” has sometimes been viewed as
a
formal suicide note. Such a
hasty conclusion deprives the poem of its significance as a work of art. As
mentioned above, “Edge” was carefully constructed through a series of drafts. A
close
inspection of its form and imagery
confirms an artistic intent, so one must look for the meaning of the poem not
in Plath’s biography, but in the poem itself. The poem argues that the woman
who is the subject of the poem is “perfected” in death, which alone offers
release from her unhappiness.
She smiles in death at the conclusion of an obviously
painful journey through life. The description of her children suggests the
malevolent role they have played in her life. She imagines them back within her
as her body closes like a chilled rose. The woman seeks to return to the
condition of the virgin, and it is to the virgin goddess, Artemis, that the
poet turns for consolation. The solitary, pure white, perfect female offers no
sympathy; the suicide has endured the ancient destiny of women. Only the woman
who can hold herself aloof from love and its demands can escape a similar fate.
It is difficult to imagine a bleaker view of human experience than that which
Plath expresses in “Edge.” She suggests that one can find happiness only in
absolute solitude, the solitude of death.
QUESTIONS
1. Odors _____________________from the
sweet deep throats of the night flower?
2. Sylvia Plath wrote the poem ‘Edge’ …………………..days prior
to committing suicide?
3. What does the title ‘Edge’ suggest?
4. What is the contract theme of the poem ‘Edge’?
5. What does the word ‘perfect’ symbolize?
6. How does the woman achieve death
according to the poet?
7. How does the poet define the murder
of the children?
8. How does the moon survey the death
scene? 9. How does the poet
picturise the dead children?
10. Write a note on the
images and metaphors used in the poem ‘Edge’?
“MOTHER TO SON”
Langston
Hughes
About the poet :
James Mercer Langston
Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist,
novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of
the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work
during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that
"the negro was in vogue" which was later paraphrased as "when
Harlem was in vogue". Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important
literary figure during the 1920s, a period known as the "Harlem
Renaissance" because of the number of emerging black writers. Du Bose
Heyward wrote in the New York Herald
Tribune in 1926: "Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years
old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are
dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an
individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as
a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always
intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of
an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that
marks the opening of a career well worth watching."
“Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes is a
short twenty line poem that packs significant meaning in the short verse.
Hughes uses an older female speaker to give advice to a son who is part of the
younger generation. In the poem, Hughes uses the device of an extended metaphor
to describe the life of the mother. The extended metaphor compares the mother’s
life to a staircase. The line “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” begins
and ends the poem. With this line,
Hughes quickly establishes that the speaker in the poem has
not had an easy life. The concept of a crystal staircase gives the reader the
impression of complete opulence. The reader can indulge in inferring that it
would be someone with supreme wealth and someone who did not have to work as
hard as the speaker did. By using the imagery of a crystal staircase as the
opposite of her staircase, the reader immediately knows before learning any of
the details of her staircase that she has not had an easy life.
Hughes then goes on to illustrate
the staircase of life that the speaker has lived. The speaker’s
staircase has splinters and tacks. Both of these would be
symbolic of the mother having suffered many hurts. A splinter or a tack will
not cause life threatening injury, but they certainly will cause pain. If the
splinters and tacks are on every step along the way, it is symbolic that her
life has always had pain.
Another descriptive detail of
the mother’s staircase is that of boards being torn up. If a person walks on a
staircase in which boards are missing, it gives the symbolic value that the
mother’s life was filled with more dangerous situations than just tacks and
splinters. It is symbolic that the mother has had gaping holes in her life that
she had to somehow step over to arrive at the present place in her life that
she is now. Not every step along the way was safe one, but despite this she
perseveres. The speaker addresses the son by saying that he should not sit down
or fall down just because his staircase is hard to climb. In the mother’s eyes,
the son should never give up. Instead
he should see her as an example because it was not easy for
her, but she never gave up. With the extended metaphor of a staircase as a
symbol of the steps one takes in life, one can infer that as long as a person
is living, there will be more steps to climb. It is like a precursor to the
concept of the popular modern song lyric “stairway to heaven”. The mother is
symbolically climbing the stairway to heaven and the path to heaven is not
always an easy journey. The mother wants the son to know that heaven is worth
by taking life one step at a time, even if the stairs are full of tacks and
splinters.
Hughes also
illustrates the sense of identity in the speaker with the use of vernacular
language. Hughes writes using the language that the mother would actually speak
with. Some examples of the vernacular language include: ain’t, finds it’s
kinder hard, and dropping the final “g” in words such as goin’ or turnin’. The
use of vernacular language gives the sense that this is a less educated woman.
The less grammatical language gives the sense that the speaker wants something
better for the son, but she knows he will still have to work for it.
On the road of
life, many trials arise that one must overcome to make his or her life feel
complete. In Langston Hughes’s poem, “Mother to Son,” these trials are a
subject of concern for one mother. Hughes’ “ability to project himself” is seen
in his use of dialect, metaphors, and tone. Although the dialect by itself does
not seem to be an important quality, however, “when it is presented with all
dramatic skill”, it is important. In “Mother to Son”, Hughes uses dialect to
show that the mother is not as well educated as many people. When she says
phrases such as “For I’se still goin’, honey,” it is understood that she means
that she is still going, even though it is not clearly said. The dialect may
also show what area she may live in. When she talks about “boards torn
up” it shows that she was from the poor part of the town. It does not seem
relevant that she has torn up boards, but these are not found in a wealthy
person’s mansion. Although the grammar of this dialect is wrong, it makes the
woman seem more like a real person and less like someone who is fictional.
Another quality that is prevalent in this poem is its metaphors. She says that
her life has not been fancy or easy, but she is getting by. While climbing her
stairs she is “reaching’ landing’s, / and turning’ corners, / and sometimes
going’ in the dark”. Although these are “homely” things someone may face on a
staircase, they actually mean things that she has encountered in her life. She
says that she reaches landings, which means that she has come up on place where
she could rest. When she says she turns corners, it is when her life changes
and she has to turn away from her original path. Her final comparison is when
she goes in the dark, which are times in her life when she does not know what she
can do to help herself. The metaphors in this poem show a conflict in the
mother’s life and make the poem seem complete. The third quality
that Langston Hughes uses in his poem is the tone of the speaker. When she
explains to him not to “set you down on the steps / ‘Cause your find it’s
kinder hard. /don’t you fall down now,” the tone in her words in compassionate.
The mother is simply trying to tell her son that she knows what he is going
through because she has been in rough times herself. Those rough times were
troublesome but she had the strength to go on and get past them. All she wants
for her son is for him to keep climbing, and never give up. Winslow
believes that “enduring exuberance”
shows her youthful spirit towards life. She wants this all because “(she is)
still goin’, honey, / (she is) still climbin ‘, /and life for (her) ain’t been
no crystal stair”. This poem, “Mother to Son” by
Langston Hughes teaches a
valuable life lesson about never giving up. Even when life is getting more
difficult and one thinks they cannot go on, they need to keep climbing.
QUESTIONS
1.
What is the title of the poem by Langston Hughes?
2.
Who is the speaker in the poem ‘Mother to Son? 3. What
is the metaphor used by the poet to compare mothers life?
4.
With which line the poem ‘Mother to Son begins and
ends?
5.
Whose lie is compared to a crystal stair case?
6.
Why does the poet use the image of a crystal stair
case?
7.
How does the poet illustrate the sense of identity in
the speaker?
8.
Whose life is compared to a crystal stair case?
9.
What kind of life mother had according to the poet?
10. What
kind of lady is the so- called mother?
11. The
metaphor crystal stair case
MODULE II:
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher
Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and
essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that
include plays such as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The
Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge
Miller was often
in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, a
period during which he testified before the House Un-American Activities
Committee, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Prince of Asturias
Award, and was married to Marilyn Monroe.
SUMMARY
It is important
to bear that the story is told through the mind and memory of Willy Loman and
there is a constant back and forth between two periods ,1928 and 1942.The first
period is one of the happiness and contentment when Willy Loman is young and
dynamic and the children ,Biff and Happy are running about in shorts ;the
second is one of gloom and discontent –Willy is now old and ,virtually out of a
job and the children are grown up and gone their different ways. The play is
thus structured in such a way to show the pleasures of the past ,the dreams and
hopes the characters had and how these
aspirations had turned sour. Willy Loman had built his life in such a way that
he had finally trapped himself in an impossible situation.
Willy Loman ,the protagonist in the play was
a travelling salesman in the services of the wagnor company for 34 years. When
his old boss died ,his son Howard took over the administration of the company
.Willy’s family consists of three other members ,his wife Linda,
Biff,the elder son and Happy, the younger son.
Willy unexpectedly returned on the same day he had left for
New England territory on a business tour. Linda felt that her husband is
thoroughly exhausted both physically and mentally and he has almost reached the breaking point. Willy, who
is 63, has driven the car off the road twice or three times and when he reached
home he was found to be panic stricken ,desolate and shattered.
Willy liked his
eldest son Biff,who was wellknown as a football champion. Though he is 34 , it
is unfortunate that he could not settle in life. Inspite of the fact that three
colleges offered him scholarship in recognition of his proficiency in football,
he did not join any college . Happy, the women chaser also could not settle in
life.
For the next two days, immediately after
his unexpected return, Willy’s mind was rather disturbed with thoughts of
today’s realities inter mingled with yesterday’s half forgotten episodes.
He felt that it was mistake on
his part not to have followed his elder brother Ben ,who dared his way into the
diamond minds of Africa and amassed fabulous wealth . Willy’s guilty
consciousness pricked him at the flash back scene of Boston hotel room, when
his son Biff makes a surprise visit and finds his father having an affair with
a strange lady .After this episode, Biff seemed to hold a grudge against his
father and could never again bring himself to trust Willy. As suggested by
Linda, Willy visits Howard, the young Boss and request for a change of job in
the New York City office as he is physically and mentally incapacitated as a
travelling sales man. When the request was unceremoniously turned down by
Howard and Willy dismissed from service he protest “You cannot eat orange and
throw the peel away; man is not a piece of fruit”.
Willy is very much frustrated and disillusioned at the
behavior of capitalists who lacked the human milk of kindness, sympathy and
gratitude. Biff’s attempt to raise a loan from Bill Oliver , the proprietor of
sports goods company also failed. Oliver, who once liked Biff immensely, now
refused to recognise him now because Biff has stolen a fountain pen, Charley
,Willy’s neighbour extended a helping hand in those days of adversity. He ,not
only advanced a loan to him but also offered him a job to him. But Willy
refused to accept it with a false sense of dignity. The two sons invited the
father for a dinner party at a prominent restaurant in the city. But Happy
picked up two call girls and left the place along with Biff, leaving Willy
alone. Willy felt humiliated and this experience was shocking and unbearable
when Biff and Happy returned home, Linda ordered them out of the house by the
next morning. She was planning to commit suicide on a particular night .Willy
was left alone while all others went upstairs. He has insured his life for
20,000 dollars. Once he dies, the family will be entitled to receive the
amount from the insurance company. So
Willy got into his car and drove madly through darkness, only to kill himself.
His funeral was attended only by Linda, the two sons, charley and his son
Bernard. Linda could not stand the strain of separation from her beloved
husband; but still she stooped down and dropped flowers on the grave of Willy.
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
AS A TRAGEDY:
According to the
traditional views based on Aristotelian cannons, the tragic hero was to be a
person of high rank and status. So that his down fall could produce an
inevitable emotional effect on the audience. In ancient Greek tragedies, fate
or destiny is mainly responsible for the downfall of human beings. But
Shakespeare and Marlow attributed human misfortune mainly to the personal draw
backs of the tragic heroes themselves and hardly to the hidden forces which we
describe as fate or destiny.
Miller generally
departs from both these concepts of tragedy as in the tragic hero in the Death
of a sales man belongs to the middle class. He does not hold the view that
tragic effect can be produced only by the downfall of a highly placed
individual in society. It matters not at all whether hero falls from a great
height or small one, whether he highly conscious or dimly aware of what is
happening ,if the intensity is their
‘America grows like a giant in unimaginable proportions ‘.
Willy symbolically stands for all the low
men in American business community not just salesmen –who in a way sell
themselves. Willy sells himself and in the process wears himself out and he is
finally discarded when he is no longer useful. Willy begins as a salesman 36
years ago, opens up unheard of territories to their trade mark, but in his old
age they take his salary away. It is pity that once Willy’s energy is exhausted
by the work that society has assigned to him, he is thrown aside and dismissed
by the son of his old boss. Willy
protests, ”you cannot eat the orange and throw them peel “. Man is not a piece
of fruit no doubt ,Willy loman is a
superannuated employee, but he is rejected and ill treated by his employer at
the end of his career. Even a change of job with less travelling was denied to
him. But still it may not be fully
correct to say that Willy is wholly a victim of the prevailing social system.
His own responsibility of his tragedy is by no means insignificant or
negligible. In the first place he failed to realize his own limitations and
short comings Willy has the conviction that success depends on personality,
contacts and good cloths and that these will bring everything one wants in
life. Obviously Willy is a prey to that magical book of Dale carnegie’s ‘How to
win friends and influence people ‘ we know that
mistake is that Willy
had chosen a wrong profession for himself under the impression that the selling
profession is the best in the world.
Secondly the
sense of guilt which he carries with him due to his past infidelity to his wife has also serious
repercussions in his mental stability .His affair with the woman in the hotel
when he was visited by Biff hangs on his conscience. Biff’s discovery of Willy’s infidelity marks the crucial
turning point in the relationship
between the father and the son .There after Biff no longer believes
Willy .
Another
point to be noted is Willy’s incurable optimism .He has had higher expectation
about the future
of his elder son Biff who looks so charming as the Adonise in Greek
mythology and who has earned high reputation as a good football champion. Biff
has become disillusioned .For Biff ,life came to be an end with his match. He
could neither make a mark in business nor could he go back to school to finish
his course. Ironically Bernard who never represented University of Virginia, Bernard who pleaded to carry Biff’s
helmet or shoulder guards , prospered. Bernard wins glory by pleading before
the supreme court ,but he does this without any pushing from his father.
According to Willy, they ought to be success at all; for both Charley and
Bernard were not well liked. These tragic experiences shatter Willy’s
conception of American dreams. No human or super natural agency interfered his
life .The sense of frustration and psychological neurosis upsets his mental
equilibrium and shatters him to pieces. Character
List
Willy Loman: An insecure, self-deluded
traveling salesman. Willy believes wholeheartedly in the American Dream of easy
success and wealth, but he never achieves it. Nor do his sons fulfill his hope
that they will succeed where he has failed. When Willy's illusions begin to
fail under the pressing realities of his life, his mental health begins to
unravel. The overwhelming tensions caused by this disparity, as well as those
caused by the societal imperatives that drive Willy, form the essential
conflict of Death of a Salesman.
Biff Loman: Willy's
thirty-four-year-old elder son. Biff led a charmed life in high school as a
football star with scholarship prospects, good male friends, and fawning female
admirers. He failed math, however, and did not have enough credits to graduate.
Since then, his kleptomania has gotten him fired from every job that he has
held. Biff represents Willy's vulnerable, poetic, tragic side. He cannot ignore
his instincts, which tell him to abandon Willy's paralyzing dreams and move out
West to work with his hands. He ultimately fails to reconcile his life with
Willy's expectations of him.
Linda Loman: Willy's
loyal, loving wife. Linda suffers through Willy's grandiose dreams and
self-delusions. Occasionally, she seems to be taken in by Willy's self-deluded
hopes for future glory and success, but at other times, she seems far more
realistic and less fragile than her husband. She has nurtured the family
through all of Willy's misguided attempts at success, and her emotional
strength and perseverance support Willy until his collapse.
Happy Loman: Willy's
thirty-two-year-old younger son. Happy has lived in Biffs shadow all of his
life, but he compensates by nurturing his relentless sex drive and professional
ambition. Happy represents Willy's sense of self-importance, ambition, and
blind servitude to societal expectations. Although he works as an assistant to
an assistant buyer in a department store, Happy presents himself as supremely
important. Additionally, he practices bad business ethics and sleeps with the
girlfriends of his superiors.
Charley- Willy's
next - door neighbor. Charley owns a successful business and his son, Bernard,
is a wealthy, important lawyer. Willy is jealous of Charley's success. Charley
gives Willy money to pay his bills, and Willy reveals at one point, choking
back tears, that Charley is his only friend.
Bernard - Bernard
is Charley's son and an important, successful lawyer. Although Willy used to
mock Bernard for studying hard, Bernard always loved Willy's sons dearly and
regarded Biff as a hero. Bernard's success is difficult for Willy to accept
because his own sons' lives do not measure up.
Ben - Willy's
wealthy older brother. Ben has recently died and appears only in Willy's
"daydreams." Willy regards Ben as a symbol of the success that he so
desperately craves for himself and his sons.
The Woman - Willy's
mistress when Happy and Biff were in high school. The Woman's attention and
admiration boost Willy's fragile ego. When Biff catches Willy in his hotel room
with The Woman, he loses faith in his father, and his dream of passing math and
going to college dies.
Howard Wagner - Willy's boss. Howard
inherited the company from his father, whom Willy regarded as "a masterful
man" and "a prince." Though much younger than Willy, Howard
treats Willy with condescension and eventually fires him, despite Willy's
wounded assertions that he named Howard at his birth.
Stanley - A
waiter at Frank’s Chop House. Stanley and Happy seem to be friends, or at least
acquaintances, and they banter about and ogle Miss Forsythe together before
Biff and Willy arrive at the restaurant.
Miss Forsythe and
Letta - Two young women whom Happy and Biff meet at Frank's Chop House. It
seems likely that Miss Forsythe and Letta are prostitutes, judging from Happy's
repeated comments about their moral character and the fact that they are
"on call."
Jenny - Charley's
secretary
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Themes
are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The American Dream
Willy believes
wholeheartedly in what he considers the promise of the American Dream— that a
“well liked” and “personally attractive” man in business will indubitably and
deservedly
acquire the material comforts offered by modern American
life. Oddly, his fixation with the superficial qualities of attractiveness and
likeability is at odds with a more gritty, more rewarding understanding of the
American Dream that identifies hard work without complaint as the key to success.
Willy’s interpretation of likeability is superficial—he childishly dislikes
Bernard because he considers Bernard a nerd. Willy’s blind faith in his stunted
version of the American Dream leads to his rapid psychological decline when he
is unable to accept the disparity between the Dream and his own life.
Abandonment
Willy’s life charts a course from one
abandonment to the next, leaving him in greater despair each time. Willy’s
father leaves him and Ben when Willy is very young, leaving Willy neither a tangible
(money) nor an intangible (history) legacy. Ben eventually departs for Alaska,
leaving Willy to lose himself in a warped vision of the American Dream. Likely
a result of these early experiences, Willy develops a fear of abandonment,
which makes him want his family to conform to the American Dream. His efforts
to raise perfect sons, however, reflect his inability to understand reality.
The young Biff, whom Willy considers the embodiment of promise, drops Willy and
Willy’s zealous ambitions for him when he finds out about Willy’s adultery.
Biff’s ongoing inability to succeed in business furthers his estrangement from
Willy. When, at Frank’s
Chop House, Willy finally believes that Biff is on the cups
of greatness, Biff shatters Willy’s illusions and, along with Happy, abandons
the deluded, babbling Willy in the washroom.
Betrayal
Willy’s
primary obsession throughout the play is what he considers to be Biff’s
betrayal of
his ambitions for him. Willy
believes that he has every right to expect Biff to fulfill the promise inherent
in him. When Biff walks out on Willy’s ambitions for him, Willy takes this
rejection as a personal affront (he associates it with “insult” and “spite”).
Willy, after all, is a salesman, and Biff’s ego-crushing
rebuff ultimately reflects Willy’s inability to sell him on the American
Dream—the product in which Willy himself believes most faithfully. Willy
assumes that Biff’s betrayal stems from Biff’s discovery of Willy’s affair with
The Woman—a betrayal of Linda’s love. Whereas Willy feels that Biff has
betrayed him, Biff feels that Willy, a “phony little fake,” has betrayed him
with his unending stream of ego-stroking lies.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and
inform the text’s major themes.
Mythic Figures
Willy’s tendency to mythologize people
contributes to his deluded understanding of the world. He speaks of Dave
Singleman as a legend and imagines that his death must have been beautifully
noble. Willy compares Biff and Happy to the mythic Greek figures Adonis and
Hercules because he believes that his sons are pinnacles of “personal
attractiveness” and power
through “well liked”-ness; to
him, they seem the very incarnation of the American Dream.
Willy’s
mythologizing proves quite nearsighted, however. Willy fails to realize the hopelessness
of Singleman’s lonely, on-the-job, on-the-road death. Trying to achieve what he
considers to be Singleman’s heroic status, Willy commits himself to a pathetic
death and meaningless legacy (even if Willy’s life insurance policy ends up
paying off, Biff wants nothing to do with Willy’s ambition for him).
The American West, Alaska, and the African
Jungle
These
regions represent the potential of instinct to Biff and Willy. Willy’s father
found
success in Alaska and his brother,
Ben, became rich in Africa; these exotic locales, especially when compared to
Willy’s banal Brooklyn neighborhood, crystallize how Willy’s obsession with the
commercial world of the city has trapped him in an unpleasant reality. Whereas
Alaska and the African jungle symbolize Willy’s failure, the American West, on
the other hand, symbolizes Biff’s potential. Biff realizes that he has been
content only when working on farms, out in the open. His westward escape from
both Willy’s delusions and the commercial world of the eastern
United States suggests a nineteenth-century pioneer
mentality—Biff, unlike Willy, recognizes the importance of the individual.
Symbols
Symbols are
objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or
concepts.
Seeds
Seeds represent for
Willy the opportunity to prove the worth of his labor, both as a salesman and a
father. His desperate, nocturnal attempt to grow vegetables signifies his shame
about barely being able to put food on the table and having nothing to leave
his children when he passes. Willy feels that he has worked hard but fears that
he will not be able to help his offspring any more than his own abandoning
father helped him. The seeds also symbolize Willy’s sense of failure with Biff.
Despite the American Dream’s formula for success, which Willy considers
infallible, Willy’s efforts to cultivate and nurture Biff went awry. Realizing
that his all-American football star has turned into a lazy bum, Willy takes
Biff’s failure and lack of ambition as a reflection of his abilities as a
father.
Diamonds
To Willy, diamonds
represent tangible wealth and, hence, both validation of one’s labor (and life)
and the ability to pass material goods on to one’s offspring, two things that
Willy desperately craves. Correlatively, diamonds, the discovery of which made
Ben a fortune, symbolize Willy’s failure as a salesman. Despite Willy’s belief
in the American Dream, a belief unwavering to the extent that he passed up the
opportunity to go with Ben to Alaska, the Dream’s promise of financial security
has eluded Willy. At the end of the play, Ben encourages Willy to enter the
“jungle” finally and retrieve this elusive diamond—that is, to kill himself for
insurance money in order to make his life meaningful.
Linda’s and the
Woman’s Stockings
Willy’s strange
obsession with the condition of Linda’s stockings foreshadows his later
flashback to Biff’s discovery of him and The Woman in their Boston hotel room.
The teenage
Biff accuses Willy of giving away
Linda’s stockings to The Woman. Stockings assume a metaphorical weight as the
symbol of betrayal and sexual infidelity. New stockings are important for both
Willy’s pride in being financially successful and thus able to provide for his
family and for Willy’s ability to ease his guilt about, and suppress the memory
of, his betrayal of Linda and Biff.
The Rubber Hose
The
rubber hose is a stage prop that reminds the audience of Willy’s desperate
attempts at
suicide. He has apparently attempted to kill himself by
inhaling gas, which is, ironically, the very substance essential to one of the
most basic elements with which he must equip his home for his family’s health
and comfort—heat. Literal death by inhaling gas parallels the metaphorical
death that Willy feels in his struggle to afford such a basic necessity.
QUESTIONS
1.
The play ‘Death of a Salesman’ revolves mainly around a
conflict
between____________________?
2.
What are the reasons for Willy’s failure as a business
man?
3.
American dream in the play ‘Death of a salesman’. 4. What is the central theme of the play
‘Death of a salesman’.
5.
The father son conflict in the play ‘Death of a
salesman’.
6.
The hotel scene in the play ‘Death of a salesman’.
7.
The role of mother Linda Loman in the play ‘Death of a
salesman’.
8.
Why did Biff Loman leave the school?
9.
The significance of the title‘Death of a salesman’.
10. Why
did Willy commit suicide?
11.
The flash back scene in the play ‘Death of a salesman’.
12.
Miller’s play as a critique of the American way of
life.
SHORT STORIES
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER
Edgar Allan Poe
Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849), the American poet and writer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts,
of a couple of travelling actors. He deserted him when he was two years old,
and his mother passed away a year later. Through he was adopted by Joh Allan, a
rich tobacco merchant of Richmond, he felt emotionally and financially
insecure. His foster father constantly reminded him of his own charity that
made Poe’s life comfortable. Consequently he broke away from Mr. Allen after
the death of his foster- mother and Mr. Allan’s remarriage. Mean while he had
received education in a school in long land. For a while he served in the army
and worked as a journalist. He married his Cousin Virgina C Lem who died ten years
later. Poverty never spared Poe and he even attempted suicide once, through
without success. In 1849 he was found dead on the streets of Rich Mond. His
death remains a mystery.
Poe is regarded by many not only as the
first American Poet but also as the founder of modern detective stories. He
wrote many Gothic short fictions. Gothic fictions is a type of fiction which
lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding
atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre
or melodramatically violent and often deals with aberrant psychological states.
The local was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons is the typical
story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and
lustful villain and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances and
other sensational and super natural occurrences. The principal aim of such
novels was to wake chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of
horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened
up to fiction. The realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and
nightmarish terrors lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. The
Gothic novel was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s “The castle of Otranto:
A Gothic story” (1764).
‘The fall of the
House of Usher’ was published in the Sept.1839 issue of Burton’s gentleman’s
magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabeque. It contains with it the poem ‘ The Hacented palace’
which had earlier been published separately in April 1839 issue of the
Baltimore Museum magazine.
Summary
The legend opens with the unnamed narrator arriving at the
house of his friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letter from him in a
distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help.
Although Poe wrote this short story before the invention of modern
psychological science, Roderick's condition can be described according to its
terminology. They include a form of sensory overload known as hyperesthesia
(hypersensitivity to light, sounds, smells, and tastes), hypochondria (an
excessive preoccupation or worry about having a serious illness), and acute
anxiety. It is revealed that Roderick's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill and
falls into cataleptic, deathlike trances. The narrator is impressed with
Roderick's paintings, and attempts to cheer him by reading with him and
listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar. Roderick sings "The
Haunted Palace”, then tells the narrator that he believes the house he lives in
to be alive, and that this sentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry
and vegetation surrounding it.
Roderick later
informs the narrator that his sister died and insists that she be entombed for
two weeks in a vault (family tomb) in the house before being permanently
buried. The narrator helps Roderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that
Madeline has rosy cheeks, as some do after death. They inter her, but over the
next week both Roderick and the narrator find themselves becoming increasingly
agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins. Roderick comes to the
narrator's bedroom, which is situated directly above the vault, and throws open
his window to the storm. He notices that the tarn surrounding the house seems
to glow in the dark, as it glowed in Roderick Usher's paintings, although there
is no lightning.
The narrator
attempts to calm Roderick by reading aloud The
Mad Tryst, a novel involving a knight named Ethelred who breaks into a
hermit's dwelling in an attempt to escape an approaching storm, only to find a
palace of gold guarded by a dragon. He also finds hanging on the wall a shield
of shining brass on which is written a legend: that the one who slays the
dragon wins the shield. With a stroke of his mace, Ethelred kills the dragon,
who dies with a piercing shriek, and proceeds to take the shield, which falls
to the floor with an unnerving clatter.
As the narrator
reads of the knight's forcible entry into the dwelling, cracking and ripping
sounds are heard somewhere in the house. When the dragon is described as
shrieking as it dies, a shriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates
the shield falling from off the wall, a reverberation, metallic and hollow, can
be heard. Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical, and eventually exclaims
that these sounds are being made by his sister, who was in fact alive when she
was entombed and that Roderick Usher knew that she was alive. The bedroom door
is then blown open to reveal Madeline standing there. She falls on her brother,
and both land on the floor as corpses. The narrator then flees the house, and,
as he does so, notices a flash of light causing him to look back upon the House
of Usher, in time to watch it break in two, the fragments sinking into the
tarn.
QUESTIONS
1.
Who is known as then founder of modern detective
stories?
2.
What do you mean by gothic fiction? 3. Which is the
first gothic novel in English?
4.
Who are the characters in the story ‘The fall of the
house of usher?
5.
The gothic features in the story ‘The fall of the house
of usher?
6.
Poe’s story has ………………………..features
7.
The role of the ballad in Poe’s story
8.
How does the story
‘The fall of the house of usher ‘end?
9.
Who is Lady Madeline?
10.
Which is considered as Poe’s most famous work of prose?
11.
What are the traditional gothic elements used by Allan
Poe?
12.
How does poet create the confusion between the living
things and inanimate objects?
BARN BURNING
William Faulkner
“Barn Burning" is a short story by the
American author William Faulkner which first appeared in Harper's in 1939 and has since been widely anthologized. The story
deals with class conflicts, the influence of fathers, and vengeance as viewed
through the third-person perspective of a young, impressionable child. It is a
prequel to The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, the three novels make up the Snopes trilogy.
Characters
Colonel Sartorius Snoops ("Sarty") - protagonist
Abler Snoops – patriarch of the Snoops family, Antagonist
Lonnie Snoops – wife of Abler and mother of Sarty
Lizzie – unmarried sister of Lonnie Snoops
Major de Spain - Snopes's employer
Mr. Harris - Abner's first mentioned landowner
Plot Summary
Abner Snoops, the
father of young "Sarty" Snoops, is being driven out of town after
burning down his landlord's barn. In the court case that opens the story and in
which Sarty is initially called to testify, no palpable proof can point to
Abner as the culprit, but the Snoops family is ordered to leave the county.
They move to a new place where Abner is to work as a sharecropper for Major de
Spain, but Abner cannot seem to control his pyromania and hatred for society.
Shortly after
arriving at his new position, Abner visits Major de Spain's house and tracks
horse droppings on a blond rug. Major de Spain orders Abner to clean the rug,
which he does by using harsh lye soap, ruining the rug beyond repair, before
throwing the rug onto Major de Spain's front porch. Major de Spain levies on
Abner a fine of 20 bushels of corn against the price of the rug. At court, a
Justice of the Peace reduces the fine to ten bushels of corn. Feeling once
again wronged, Abner makes preparations to set fire to Major de Spain's barn.
Sarty warns Major de Spain of his father's intentions to burn down his barn and
then flees in the direction of his father. He is soon overtaken by Major de
Spain on his horse and jumps into the ditch to get out of the way. Sarty hears
three gun shots, but who gets shot is never revealed; the father and the
brother appear in works set after "Barn Burning." Profoundly affected
by his father's legacy, the boy does not return to his family but continues on
with his life alone.
Context Born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, William Faulkner
became famous for a series of novels that explore the South’s historical
legacy, its fraught and often tensely violent present, and it’s uncertain
future. This grouping of major works includes The Sound and the
Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1931), and Absalom, Absalom!
(1936) , all firmly rooted in the fictional Mississippi county of
Yoknapatawpha. By creating an imaginary setting, Faulkner allows his characters
to inhabit a fully realized world that serves as a mirror to and microcosm of
the South that the novelist knew so well and explored so deeply. Faulkner’s
legendary milieu serves as a safe and distant—albeit magnifying—lens through
which he could examine the practices, folkways, and attitudes that have united
and divided the people of the South.
Faulkner was particularly interested in the
moral implications of history. As the South emerged from the Civil War and
Reconstruction and attempted to shake off the stigma of slavery, its residents
were often portrayed as being caught in competing and evolving modes, torn
between a new and an older, more tenaciously rooted world order. Religion and
politics frequently fell short of their implied goals of providing order and
guidance and served only to complicate and divide. Society, with its gossip,
judgment, and harsh pronouncements, conspired to thwart the desires and
ambitions of individuals struggling to unearth and embrace their identities.
Across Faulkner’s fictive landscapes, individual characters often stage epic
struggles, prevented from realizing their potential or establishing and
asserting a firm sense of their place in the world.
“Barn Burning,” in
its examination of a boy’s struggle with family loyalty and a higher sense of
justice fits firmly in Faulkner’s familiar fictional mode. Poverty and
irrational, criminal
behavior divide a family and, in
the end, leave them more indigent and dependent than ever. The story first
appeared in the June 1939 issue of Harper’s magazine and received the O. Henry
Award for the year’s best work of short fiction. The story, a critical and popular
favorite, was included in Faulkner’s Collected Stories (1950) and later
reprinted in the Selected Short Stories of
William Faulkner (1961) . In his portrayal of the Snoops
clan, an underprivileged family with few economic prospects, Faulkner examines
the deep-rooted classism and systems that rigidly divided southern society
along racial, economic, and familial lines. The Synopses and their struggle, in
particular, symbolize the falling away of an old order, as the agrarian South
slowly shifted to embrace a new era of industrialization and modernization.
Although Faulkner’s merciless portrayal of Abner Snoops precludes any sympathy
for his peculiar brand of vigilante justice, the harsh reality the family faced
was little more than institutionalized slavery and a life sentence of poverty
and subsistence living.
Abner Snoops
represents a common trope in Faulkner’s fiction—the dispossessed male, shorn of
power and lashing out at a world that he perceives as habitually wronging him
and thwarting his felonious desires. Faulkner examines the sway that such
menacing figures have over family and community by portraying the individuals
caught up in the shadows of these savage
personalities,
individuals who are powerless and often culpable. Freedom comes only for Sartorius,
the youngest Snoops boy, but, as is frequently the case in Faulkner’s works,
emancipation comes at a price. Sartorius has defended his
sense of honor and attempted to restore the family name, but he ultimately
faces an uncertain future alone.
Faulkner won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, and he donated half the prize money to a
fund that supports new writers. His gift takes the form today of the
PEN/Faulkner Award. He died in 1962.
Plot Overview
Young Colonel
Sartorius Snoops crouches on a keg in the back of the store that doubles for
the town court. He cannot see the table where his father and his father’s
opponent, Mr. Harris, are seated. The justice of the peace asks Mr. Harris for
proof that Mr. Snoops burned his barn. Mr. Harris describes the numerous times
Snopes’s hog broke through the fence and got into his cornfields. The final
time, when Mr. Harris demanded a dollar for the animal’s return, the black man
who was sent to fetch the hog gave Mr. Harris an ominous warning that wood and hay
are combustible. Later that night, fire claimed Mr. Harris’s barn. While the
judge claims that by itself isn’t proof, Mr. Harris has Sartorius called to
testify before the court. The boy knows his father is expecting him to lie on
his behalf. After doing so, the judge asks Mr. Harris whether he wants the
child cross-examined, but Mr. Harris snarls to have the boy removed.
The judge dismisses the charges against
Snoops but warns him to leave the county for good, and Snoops agrees to comply.
Snoops and his two sons then leave the store and head to their wagon. A child
in the crowd accuses them of being barn burners and strikes Sartorius, knocking
him down. Snoops orders Sartorius into the wagon, which is laden with their
possessions and where his two sisters, mother, and aunt are waiting. Snoops
prevent his crying wife from cleaning Sartorius’s bloodied face. That night,
the family camps around the father’s
typically small fire. Snoops wake Sartorius and take him
onto the dark road, where he accuses him of planning to inform the judge of his
guilt in the arson case. Snoops strikes Sartorius on the head and tells him he
must always remain loyal to his family.
The next day, the
family arrives at its new home and begins unloading the wagon. Snoops takes
Sartorius to the house of Major de Spain, the owner on whose land the family
will work. Despite the servant’s protests, Snoops tracks horse manure into the
opulent house, leaving only when Miss Lula asks him to. He resentfully remarks
that the home was built by slave labor. Two hours later, the servant drops off
the rug that Snoops had soiled and instructs him to clean and return it. Snoops
supervise as the two sisters reluctantly clean the carpet with lye, and he uses
a jagged stone to work the surface of the expensive rug. After dinner, the
family retires to their sleeping areas. Snoops forces Sartorius to fetch the
mule and ride along with him to return the cleaned rug. At the house, Snoops
flings the rug onto the floor after loudly kicking at the door several times.
The next morning,
as Sartorius and Snoops prepare the mules for plowing, de Spain arrives on
horseback to inform them that the rug was ruined from improper cleaning. In
lieu of the hundred-dollar replacement fee, the major says Snoops will be
charged twenty additional bushels of corn. Sartorius defends Snopes’s actions,
telling him that he did the best he could with the soiled carpet and that they
will refuse to supply the extra crops. Snoops puts Sartorius back to work, and
the following days are consumed with the constant labor of working their
acreage. Sartorius hopes that Snoops will turn once and for all from his
destructive impulses.
The next weekend, Snoops and his two sons
head once again to a court appearance at the country store, where the well-dressed
de Spain is in attendance. Sartorius attempts to defend Snoops, saying that he
never burned the barn, but Snoops orders him back to the wagon. The judge
mistakenly thinks the rug was burned in addition to being soiled and destroyed.
He rules that Snoops must pay ten extra bushels of corn when the crop comes
due, and court is adjourned. After a trip to the blacksmith’s shop for wagon
repairs, a light meal in front of the general store, and a trip to a corral
where horses are displayed and sold, Snoops and his sons return home after
sundown.
Despite
his wife’s protests, Snoops empties the kerosene from the lamp back into its
five-
gallon container and secures a
lit candle stub in the neck of a bottle. Snoops orders Sartorius to fetch the
oil. He obeys but fantasizes about running away. He tries to dissuade Snoops,
but Snoops grabs Sartorius by the collar and orders his wife to restrain him.
Sartorius escapes his mother’s clutches and runs to the de Spain house,
bursting in on the startled servant. Breathlessly, he blurts out the word Barn!
Sartorius runs desperately down the road, moving aside as the major’s horse.
Character List
Colonel Sartorius Snoops (Sarty) - A ten-year-old boy and the
story’s protagonist. Small and wiry, with wild, gray eyes and uncombed brown
hair, Sartorius wears patched and faded jeans that are too small for him. He
has inherited his innocence and morality from his mother, but his father’s
influence has made Sartorius old beyond his years. He is forced to confront an
ethical
quandary that pits his loyalty
to his family against the higher concepts of justice and morality. Abler Snoops - Sartorius’s father and a
serial arsonist. Cold and violent, Snoops has a harsh, emotionless voice,
shaggy gray eyebrows, and pebble-colored eyes. Stiff-bodied, he walks with a
limp he acquired from being shot by a Confederate’s provost thirty years
earlier while stealing a horse during the Civil War. Known for his wolf like
independence and anger, he is convinced of his right to unleash his destructive
revenge on anyone whom he believes has wronged him.
Lennie Snoops -
Sartorius’s mother. Sad, emotional, and caring, Lennie futilely attempts to
stem her husband’s destructive impulses. She is beaten down by the family’s
endless cycle of flight and resettlement and the pall of criminality that has
stained her clan. Nervous in the presence of her irascible, unpredictable
husband, she is a slim source of comfort for Sartoris in the violencetinged
world of the Snopes family.
Major
de Spain - A well-dressed and affluent landowner. De Spain brings the
soiled rug to the Snopeses’ cabin and insists that they clean it and return it.
Snopes’s unpredictable nature unsettles de Spain, and he uneasily answers
Snopes’s charges in court.
Mr.
Harris - A landowner for whom the Snopeses were short-term tenants. The
plaintiff in the first court case, Harris had attempted to resolve the conflict
over the Snopeses’ hog. In the end, he
is left with a burned barn and
no legal recourse, as his case is dismissed for lack of evidence.
Colonel
John Snopes - Sartoris’s older brother. Although his name is not given in
the story, Faulkner’s other works of fiction feature the same character and
identify him. A silent, brooding
version of his
father, John is slightly thicker, with muddy eyes and a habit of chewing
tobacco. Net and an Unnamed Sister -
Sartoris’s twin sisters. In his brief description of the two women,
Faulkner focuses on their
physicality and corpulence. They are described as large, bovine, and lethargic,
with flat loud voices. They are cheaply dressed in calico and ribbons.
Lizzie - Lennie’s sister and Sartoris’s aunt. Lizzie supplies a
voice of justice and morality when she boldly asserts, at the end of the story,
that if Sartoris does not warn the de Spains that their barn is about to be
burned, then she will.
Lula de Spain -
Major de Spain’s wife. Lula wears a smooth, gray gown with lace at the throat,
with rolled-up sleeves and an apron tied around her. Assertive but intimidated
by the imposing presence of Snopes, she resents having her home violated.
The Servant - A
man in livery who works in the de Spain mansion. When Snopes bursts in and
damages the rug, he calls the servant a racist epithet, viewing his presence as
a mere extension of the slavery that dominated the South until the Civil War.
Themes, Mofits, and Symbols
Themes
Loyalty to Family versus Loyalty to the Law
In “Barn Burning,” Sartoris must decide
whether loyalty to family or loyalty to the law is the moral imperative. For
the Snopes family, particularly for Sartoris’s father, family loyalty is valued
above all. The family seems to exist outside of society and even outside the
law, and their moral code is based on family loyalty rather than traditional
notions of right or wrong. Snopes tells Sartoris that he should remain loyal to
his “blood,” or family, or he will find himself alone.
This threat suggests how isolated the family really is and
how fully they rely on one another for protection, even when their faith in
this protection is unfounded.
Blood in a literal
sense appears as well, underscoring the intensity of the ties among family. For
example, when the Snopes are leaving the makeshift courthouse at the beginning
of the story, a local boy accuses Snopes of being a barn burner, and, when
Sartoris whirls around to confront him, the boy hits Sartoris and bloodies his
face. The blood, dried and caked on his face during the ride out of town, is,
in a way, a mark of pride: Sartoris had defended the family name. However,
after Snopes once again plans to burn a barn, Sartoris understands that family
loyalty comes at too great a cost and is too heavy a burden. He rejects family
loyalty and instead betrays his father, warning de Spain that his barn is about
to be burned. Only when Snopes is killed— presumably shot to death by de Spain
at the end of the story—is the family free. They were loyal, but they still
wind up alone.
The Search for Peace
Surrounded by violence and conflict,
Sartoris is constantly overwhelmed by fear, grief, and despair, and he knows
that he must search for peace if he ever wants to be free from these tumultuous
emotions. Sartoris specifically refers to fear, grief, and despair throughout
the story, revealing the depth of his struggle to find his place among the
demands of his family and his own developing ideas of morality. To Sartoris,
peace, joy, and dignity are the alluring promises of a different kind of life,
one that seems very far away from life in the Snopes household. His sense that
a different kind of life exists grows particularly acute when he and Snopes
approach de Spain’s house. Sartoris is enamored with the grounds and the
imposing house, and the domestic bliss that seems to emanate from the estate
gives Sartoris a temporary comfort. The “spell of the house” seems to change
everything, and Sartoris foolishly hopes that it has the power to turn his
father from his criminal ways. For the first time, Sartoris has glimpsed a
peaceful future.
Although Sartoris eventually
frees himself from his father and his oppressive family life, he does not
immediately find the peace and dignity that he expected would await him.
Perhaps the happiness he seeks does exist for him in the future, as he leaves
his family and old life behind without looking back. However, Sartoris has
found a quieter, more subtle form of happiness. Life under his father was lived
in a heightened state of extreme fear, grief, and despair. Now, the extreme
emotions that loomed over Sartoris’s young life have eased. His life may not
have undergone a radical transformation, but “grief and despair [were] now no
longer terror and fear but just grief and despair.” Sartoris can’t escape
entirely, but he has already achieved a kind of peace.
Motifs
Darkness
The pervasive
darkness in “Barn Burning” gestures to the lack of clarity that prevails in
Snopes’s thoughts and actions as well as the bleakness into which Snopes drags
his family. Several significant episodes in the family’s life occur under cover
of darkness.
The Word Ravening
The word ravening, which means devouring greedily, destroying,
or preying on, appears
several times in the story, and
every time it highlights Snopes’s malicious character.
Symbols
Fire
Fire is a constant
threat in “Barn Burning,” and it represents both Snopes’s inherent
powerlessness and his quest for power and self-expression.
QUESTIONS
1.
Sarty had to choose between family and
_________________
2.
Comment on the title ‘Barn Burning’
3.
Abner Snopes has a_________________________
4.
Attempt a character sketch of
Abner Snopes Sarty Snopes
5.
What is the theme of the story ‘Barn Burning’
B POST COLONIALISM
MODULE: 3-POETRY
THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF ME
Margret Atwood
About the poet
Margaret Eleanor
Atwood, (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic,
essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honored authors of
fiction in recent history. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and
Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker
Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's
Award seven times, winning twice. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust
of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's
writing community. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is
also a poet, having published fifteen books of poetry to date. Many of her
poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of
hers from an early age. She has also published four collections of stories and
three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.
About the poem:
In
this poem the speaker is passively exposed to the photograph. This is a photo
of
the poet that others have taken. This is a history of the
poet which others have created. The others are males who are active in making
history of females.
When other makes history of female then
there comes the problem of precision and accuracy. In patriarchy males are
creating women’s story. Photograph was taken sometimes ago.
The speaker has not specified the time. The photograph is not
clear, lines are blurred, and the light of photograph has become dim.
Photograph stands for her history which is not clear; light stands for the
creativity of the woman. If a woman does some important work in the society,
that is shadowed. Patriarchy ignores the contribution of female. In the left
hand corner, there are branches of tree. These branches of tree have emerged to
right hand side. In right hand side there is a frame house. This can be seen if
you see the photograph minutely. Here the right hand side (frame House) stands
for male and left hand side (branches) stands for female. A woman is treated as
left hand and man is treated as right hand. Woman is placed on the left hand
simply associated with branches which have no roots and man is placed on the
right hand side. Left hand is normally weaker than right hand. Females are
supposed to be weaker and passive than male. Lake stands for the society of the
photograph. Beyond the society, there are low hills. Hills and lakes keep the
woman in shadow. Hills and lakes are the causes that distort her history.
Margaret is trying to show the small frame houses that are not responsible for
the exploitations of women. As a whole, society or the lake/ hill are
responsible for the happenings to women.
The speaker is not taken out of the lake.
The poet portrays
identity crisis. She is the center of
domestic work, but marginalized in social, political and economical fields. The
last line is revolutionary. Despite all the discrimination she is there. They
can destroy her photograph but cannot destroy her existence. Woman is exploited
since time immemorial. Therefore the speaker does not like to historicize the
time.
The title of Margaret Atwood's "This
is a Photograph of Me" is quite suggestive. The title may give rise to
several interpretations. The poetess may want our attention drawn to the
photograph. She looks very different in reality. However, the most plausible
interpretation would be that- the general perception or outlook about her was
quite different; this was her real self in the photograph. She first goes on to
describe the photo in terms of time, it was not a recent photograph but taken
some time ago. It appears to be smeared (out of deconstruction).These appeared
to be blurred lines as though she was graphically analyzed. The blurred lines
and grey flecks (aspersions) seem to be blended with the paper itself. They
have now become intricately linked with her personality. The poetess is
therefore depicted in the first stanza by means of logical analysis, and in
terms of the material. Woman has always been intellectually disregarded; she
rather remains a material commodity for commercialization. The advertisements
of today pose as the best instances. We stumble upon the truth as the poetess
declares in the next line: The photograph was taken the day after I drowned.
Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
Civilization vs. Wilderness
Society, civilization, and culture
represent the rational side of humanity, while the wild forest represents the
very opposite: the irrational, primeval, and carnal impulses that exist in
every living being.
The Inevitability of Death
Atwood
demonstrates a remarkable determination to confront death in her poetry.
Motifs
Photographs
In her poems, Atwood
uses photographs to explore identity, particularly the facades women adopt to
conform (at least superficially) to society. “This is a photograph of me,” the
first poem in her first collection, plays with the conventional equation of
appearance and reality. The photograph obscures, rather than reveals, the
speaker’s mysterious identity and history.
The Female Body
The female body represents servitude and
entrapment, victimization and imprisonment— otherness as defined by a men.
The female body also demonstrates the
unbreakable connection between the Earth and women, proof of a woman’s
vulnerability and mortality. While the female body can represent continuity,
sensual pleasure, and self-reliance, in most of Atwood’s work, there is some
disjunction between substance and spirit, between flesh and essence.
QUESTIONS
1.
What is the title of the poem by Margaret Atwood?
2.
What things were there in the photograph?
3.
Whose photograph is mentioned in the poem?
4.
Who has taken the photograph of the poet?
5.
When was the photograph taken?
6.
How does the poet picturise the photograph?
7.
What does the lake stand for? 8. Who creates the
history of the lady?
9.
What is the significance of the title ‘This is a
photograph of me’?
10. The
post colonial aspects in the poem ‘This is a photograph of me’?
11. For
whom the poet talk in this poem?
12. What
does the photograph symbolize?
KAMAU BRATHWAITE: THE EMIGRANTS
About the poet
( Edward) Kamau
Brathwaite was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, on May 11, 1930. He attended
Harrison College in Barbados and graduated with honors from Pembroke College,
Cambridge, England, in 1953. After working as an education officer in Ghana and
teaching on the Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies, he
returned to England and received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in
1968.
His many books of
poetry include Elegguas (Wesleyan
University Press, 2010), Born to Slow
Horses (2005), Ancestors (New
Directions, 2001), Words Need Love Too (2000),
Black + Blues (1995), Roots (1993), and Trench town Rock (1993) , among others.
His poetry traces
historical links and events that have contributed to the development of the
black population in the Caribbean Islands and is distinguished by its
experimental linguistic (and often multilingual) explorations of African
identity in the West Indies. He is also the author of two plays and several
collections of essays and literary criticism.
Brathwaite has received the Neustadt
International Award for Literature. He is a professor of comparative literature
at New York University and divides his time between Barbados and New York.
Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry traces
historical links and
events that have contributed to
the development of the black population in the Caribbean island
and is distinguished by its experimental linguistic and
often multilingual explorations of African identity in the West Indies.
Migration is perceived as one of the defining features of the Caribbean, since
colonization.
According to the poet ,those migrated
people run with cardboard grips ,felt flats and ruined cloaks and the woman
with their plain or purple tinted coats going somewhere else .They don’t know
where they are going and why they go.
The poet is picturising the Africans in the
New world. In this poem, Brathwaite presents the effects of
European colonisation of the New world. Columbus’ discovery of the New world
does not bring with it civilisation ,but rather a course of destruction that
ironically has its origin in Europe.
People
are not bothered of the discovery . poet tries to picturise the geographical
condition of Mississippi ,where mud is sticky. In London ,
the undergrounds are cold ,the train
rolls in from darkness and leaves a lonely soft metallic sounds . In New York,
nights are hot .
Poet
is presenting the shift from agriculture to industrialization. The so called
cities have stopped to know the simple human sound where
police cars wails like babies ,an ambulance erupts like breaking glass ,an
elevator sighs like Jews in Europe’s gasses. The poet describes men and women
in the cities. The men who lever ales in stuffy, woodbine pubs do not like
migrated people. There is no bread and breakfast for curly headed workers. The
poet asks the people “what to do men?”Ban
the bomb? Bomb the place down? Boycott the girls ? And Should we put a ban on
all marriages?
At
last the poet declare that Black as God, Brown
is good and
White is sin.
Yet the black people beat a restless drum .
QUESTIONS
1.
…………………….. is the historical figure mentioned in
Kamau Brathwaits poem ‘The Emigrants’?
2.
What is the theme of the poem ‘The Emigrants’?
3.
The colonial violence in Kamau’s poem?
HOUSE OF A THOUSAND DOORS
Meena Alexander
About the poet
Meena Alexander is one among the many
writers experiencing post colonialism. A specified characteristic of such post
colonial writers of our era is a general exploration of roots.
However, this does not deny the
differences among these writers search for base. Keki N Daruwalla states in one
of his article published in ‘The Hindu’, “Meena Alexander also goes for roots,
but in a different manner, lacks back to the Malabar landscape and ancestors
and ancestral houses”. Her reaction to earlier dreams and memories concerning
roots is a double natured one.
On one hand, her poetry pays tribute to traditions; on the
other hand, it goes ahead describing the general human nature.
About the poem
The poem is
about nostalgic feelings of the natives. Though Meena Alexander writes from New
York, the broad Indian tradition particularly the Kerala one, makes its
powerful presence in her poems. The coastal Kerala has its own significance as
far as her particular case is concerned. As she has crossed so many nations and
borders in the course of becoming a well known Indian poet, her debts to the
past traditions are great. Acknowledging the greatness of the past traditions
she writes
She kneels at each
Of the thousand doors in turn
Paying her dues.
Her debt is endless.
The beginning of everything is from Kerala. In every
respect, a coast marks the beginning of a new world. There is a new or alien
heritage and culture. She starts from this Kerala coast and hence the beginning
of ‘House of a Thousand Doors’ picturise a typical Kerala house with
surroundings true to its nature.
With unlisted number of debts to the tradition of Kerala,
she reaches new doors and enters new rooms. Every new room, which is largely
representative of new and alien cultures has practiced its own influential
exercise upon her. Hence,
I watch her kneel in all my life time
imploring the house hold gods
Who will not let her in.
That she has to
implore the gods to get accommodated in a new room as a perfect native is
evident here. It is this very sense that creates the diasporic experience in
Meena Alexander. This happens just out of a refusal on the part of ‘the house
hold gods’ to treat her just as a native. The house of a
thousand doors can be Kerala also. This is because various cultures have
contributed something of their own to the heritage of Kerala. Hindu, Christain,
Muslim and the Jain religious cultures along with many movements have emerged
with a blending nature in Kerala. So Kerala is a house which has many doors
which welcome all cultures. As Daruwalla puts it, ‘The house itself is a
heritage, myth and memory, abstract and concrete, the great repository of a
family past now viewed and dreamt of through the prism of the present’.
Meena Alexander
proves that “the idea of exile is not a post modern one. On the contrary it is
a very ancient one”.In the poem, life is used as a metaphor to describe the
variety of forces that operate on the persona: gender, heritage, language experience,
ideology and the search for meaning. She uses her writing to integrate the
diversity of her experience.
QUESTIONS
1.
The title of Meena Alexander’s poem is ……………………………..
2.
What does the grandmother in Meena Alexander’s poem do?
‘THE MYSTIC DRUM’
Gabriel Okara
About the poet
Gabriel Okara, in full Gabriel Imomotimi
Gbaingbain Okara (born April 21, 1921 ,
Bumodi, Nigeria), is a Nigerian poet and novelist. His verse had been
translated into several languages by the early 1960s.A largely self-educated man,
Okara became a bookbinder after leaving school and soon began writing plays and
features for radio. In 1953 his poem “The
Call of the River Nun” won an award at the Nigerian Festival of Arts. Some
of his poems were published in the influential periodical Black Orpheus, and by
1960 he was recognized as an accomplished literary craftsman.
Okara’s poetry is based on a series of
contrasts in which symbols are neatly balanced against each other. The need to
reconcile the extremes of experience (life and death are common themes)
preoccupies his verse, and a typical poem has a circular movement from everyday
reality to a moment of joy and back to reality again. Okara incorporated
African thought, religion, folklore, and imagery into both his verse and prose.
His first novel, The Voice (1964), is
a remarkable linguistic experiment in which Okara translated directly from the
Ijo (Ijaw) language, imposing Ijo syntax onto English in order to give literal
expression to African ideas and imagery. The novel creates a symbolic landscape
in which the forces of traditional African culture and Western materialism
contend. Its tragic hero, Okolo, is both an individual and a universal figure,
and the ephemeral “it” that he is searching for could represent any number of
transcendent moral values. Okara’s skilled portrayal of the inner tensions of
his hero distinguished him from many other Nigerian novelists. During much of
the 1960s Okara worked in civil service. From 1972 to
1980 he was director of the Rivers State Publishing House in
Port Harcourt. His later work includes a collection of poems, The Fisherman’s Invocation (1978) , and
two books for children, Little Snake and
Little Frog (1981) and An Adventure
to Juju Island (1992).
About the poem
The
Mystic Drum,” evinces a tripartite ritual pattern of initiation from
innocence
through intimacy to experience. The drum, in African poems, generally stands
for the spiritual pulse of traditional African life. The poet asserts that
first, as the drum beat inside him fishes danced in the rivers and men and
women danced on the land to the rhythm of the drum. But standing behind the
tree, there stood an outsider who smiled with an air of indifference at the
richness of their culture. However, the drum still continued to beat rippling the
air with quickened tempo compelling the dead to dance and sing with their
shadows. The ancestral glory overpowers other considerations. So powerful is
the mystic drum, that it brings back even the dead alive. The rhythm of the
drum is the aching for an ideal Nigerian State of harmony.
The outsider
still continued to smile at the culture from the distance. The outsider stands
for Western Imperialism that has looked down upon anything Eastern,
non-Western, alien and therefore, 'incomprehensible for their own good' as 'The
Other'. The African culture is so much in tune with nature that the mystic drum
invokes the sun, the moon; the river gods and the trees began to dance. The gap
finally gets bridged between humanity and nature, the animal world and human world,
the hydrosphere and lithosphere that fishes turned men, and men became fishes.
But later as the mystic drum stopped beating, men became men, and fishes became
fishes. Life now became dry, logical and mechanical thanks to Western
Scientific Imperialism and everything found its place. Leaves started sprouting
on the woman; she started to flourish on the land. Gradually
her roots struck the ground. Spreading a kind of parched rationalism smoke
issued from her lips and her lips parted in smile. The term 'smoke' is also
suggestive of the pollution caused by industrialization, and also the clouding
of morals. Ultimately, the speaker was left in 'belching darkness', completely
cut off from the heart of his culture, and he packed the mystic drum not to
beat loudly anymore. The 'belching darkness" alludes to the futility and
hollowness of the imposed existence.
The outsider, at
first only, has an objective role standing behind a tree. Eventually, she
intrudes and tries to weave their spiritual life. The 'leaves around her waist'
are very much suggestive of Eve who adorned the same after losing her
innocence. Leaves stop growing on the trees but only sprout on her head
implying 'deforestation." The refrain reminds us again and again, that
this Eve turns out to be the eve of Nigerian damnation.
Okara mentions in one of his interviews that "The
Mystic Drum" is essentially a love poem: "This was a lady I loved”.
And she coyly was not responding directly, but I adored her. Her demeanor
seemed to mask her true feelings; at a distance, she seemed adoring, however,
on coming closer, she was, after all, not what she seemed." This lady may
stand as an emblem that represents the lure of Western life; how it seemed
appealing at first but later seemed distasteful to the poet.
STRUCTURE
The poem has
three different parts-an initial phase of conventional knowledge when men are
men and fishes are fishes;(line 1-15) a middle phase of more intimate knowledge when men are no
longer fishes (lines 16-26) and a final
phase of ‘substantial knowledge’ when men are once again men and fishes are
once again fishes, with the difference that at this phase, the beloved lady of
the lyric is depicted as ‘standing behind a trace’ with “her lips parted in her
smile”. It is more decidedly a philosophical poem in which the dynamics
directions and management of ‘the mystic drum’ of passion that beats in the
poet’s inside are dramatically re-enacted.
At the initial
level of conventional knowledge (lines 1-7), the speaker sees people as people
and fishes as fishes. At this level, the love relationship between the lover
and his beloved is still at a primary phenomenal and mundane level of innocent
physical and sexual attraction. As at the end of the first and second phases,
the beloved is no longer simply ‘standing behind a tree/with leaves around her
waist’, only smiling “with a shake of her head”. She is no longer silent but
active, combustive, mysterious and even ominous. At this climax of his
emotional and epistemological initiation, the lover finally decides to ‘pack’
his ‘mystic drum’ turning away from an over-excited involvement in love
relationships, determined ‘never to beat so loud anymore’.
The mystic drum and the
transformations are projected to the personality of the beloved who acquires
extra-ordinary powers that effectively transform her into a supernatural being,
indeed a goddess, invested with the powers “of the things of the ground”
(earth) of the “the eye of the sky/the sun and moon”(heaven) and of the ‘river
gods’(water).
QUESTIONS
1.
She stood behind a tree with leaves around her waist
and only smiled
………………………..
2.
What happened to men and fish when the drum invoked the
sun and moon? 3. What does the drum symbolize?
4.
The outsider mentioned in the poem ‘Mystic Drum ‘stands
for whom ?
5.
‘The leaves around her waist’ –what does it suggest? 6.
What do you mean by refrain?
7.
What is the refrain mentioned in the poem ‘The mystic
drum?
8.
‘The mystic drum’ is essentially a love
poem-substantiate
AFRICA
David Diop
About the poet
David Diop was
born to a Senegalese father and Cameroonian mother in the city of Bordeaux,
France, in 1927. He debuted writing poetry while he was still at school. He was
one of the contributors to Leopold Senghor's anthology of poems published in
French. This was a major milestone in the history of black French literature as
it put forth the movement of 'Negritude' by asserting the greatness of black
people contrary to the white man's dismissal of them as primitive and
uncivilized.
Diop's poetry
talks about the glorious past of Africa and also recollects the untold
sufferings and humilities endured by the Africans in the last few hundred
years. Diop suffered from poor health for the most part of his life and died at
a very early age of 33 in a air crash off Dakar, Senegal, in 1960. His poetry
will always be remembered as one of the keystones in the arch of African
literature.
ANALYSIS
Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
The poem starts
by Diop reminiscing about Africa, a land he has not seen but only heard about
from his grandmother's songs. His choice of words like "distant"
symbolize how far he is from his country, a feeling based on his real life as
he lived in France throughout his childhood and only visited Africa in the
1950s. Despite this, he paints a vivid scene of Africa and the proud warriors
who walk on its "ancestral savannahs" You can sense how much he
misses his homeland by his stress on the word Africa, and he continues to call
it "My Africa" to emphasis it is his land and his feelings of
patriotism towards it.
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful black blood that irrigates the fields
The blood of your sweat
The sweat of your work
The work of your slavery
He continues to say
that he has never known Africa, but despite the distance he cannot deny how
much it is a part of him. The "beautiful black blood" which flows in
his veins describes his African descent and shows how much Africa is a part of him
and his love for it and its people.
The next verses are angry and accusatory as he stresses that
it is the blood and sweat of his people which is irrigating the fields for the
benefit of other people. By this he is pointing a finger at the colonialists
who exploited Black people and used them as slaves to profit from their hard
labor.
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is unbent?
This back that never breaks under the weight of humiliation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying no to the whip under the midday sun
In these verses
he urges the Black people to stand up to the pain and the humiliation that they
are suffering in their own land. He reminds them of the strength and pride they
have in them and to say no to the whip of the colonialist which makes them work
under the hot midday sun and leaves scars on their backs. Despite this
suffering he urges them to be strong and remain unbent and not let this break
them despite the weight of their suffering.
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
Springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.
In these verses
the wise voice of Africa chides him for thinking "impetuous"
thoughts, and implies to us that a continent lies in wait for something to
happen. It urges the Africans to be patient and not to be hasty like children
as there is change on the horizon. The tree "young and strong"
represents the young people of Africa who are patiently but
"obstinately" waiting until they get the liberty they want. At the
moment the tree is alone, meaning the African struggle is a lonely battle but
they will achieve the freedom and liberty they want no matter how bitter the
taste. By the "white and faded" flowers he means the colonialists who
will fade in time ; the youthful Africans will grow in strength and wait for
their moment of freedom.
David Diop's
"Africa" celebrates the typical love of the African for their
motherland and the ancestors. The Africa, the poet speaks of deals with proud
warriors in Ancestral Savannahs; the Africa of whom his grandmother sings. It
is not only with the present but also with the past. Thus the love is not
something infected but transmitted in the blood and can never be evaporated
till death. The greatest irony is that though he has never seen his ancestors,
their blood flows in his veins and thereby he can feel their love for his
country and their adoration of tradition. It is their black blood that
irrigates the fields.
The poet attacks
the world's theory that Africa does not possess a history. It is a kind of
history that the colonizers refuse to acknowledge. It involves the blood of
their sweat, the sweat of their work and the work of their slavery. It is not
any slavery, but the slavery of the children of Africa. And thus Africa's back
is bent in misery and humiliation preferring to break than bend. The back
trembling with scars has its wounds afresh and raw. Never did the sentiments of
the natives submit so indifferently to oppression of the colonizers. They are
still pained by the experiences and continue to be so. However, a ray of hope
appears in the form of a grave voice. It may symbolize the ancestors or some
African god. It ascertains to the impetuous son that the tree still stands
there young and strong and is capable of spreading its branches and reaching
out to new horizons.
The poem
"Africa" reflects the poet's vision of an independent and sovereign
Africa. Diop was strongly critical of Europe. The glorious, pre-colonial Africa
is no longer the present Africa. The lingering memories of loss, slavery,
humiliation makes the present freedom taste bitter. Postcolonial Africa is an
Africa of a different kind. Colonialism may end but the bitter memories linger
forever.
This is a poem in
which Diop by the power of his imagination calls forth three stages in the
continent of Africa's history: pre-colonial days of proud warrior tribes, the
colonial experience of subjugation and humiliation, and the postcolonial
freedom and sovereignty. The first seven lines present an essentially idealized
image of Africa with which the speaker identifies then follows a realistic
picture of Africa's experience of bitterness, despair and mockery under
colonial rule. The last eight lines present a future of hope built on some of
the realistic elements of colonial experience: Africa as a young tree patiently
springing up and gradually acquiring "the bitter taste of liberty".
In David Diop’s
poem, "Africa", the poet hopes to create a renewed Africa out of the
bitter experiences of colonialism. The poem is postcolonial as it gives the
understanding that the effects of colonialism will continue to haunt even after
the disappearance of colonialism. The poet's preoccupation with the past
glories is also suggestive of its postcolonial nature.
QUESTIONS
1.
David Diop’s
poetry talks about the ………………………………
2.
The back of Africa breaks under the weight of ………………………
3.
The title of the poem written by Diop is ………………………………
4.
The image used by the poet to represent future Africa
is ………………
5.
David Diop’s Africa celebrates the typical love of the
African for their
………………………
6.
What, according to David Diop, irrigates the fields to
enrich nature?
7.
The image ‘white and faded’ flower stands for what?
8.
How does the poem ‘Africa’ start?
9.
What are the stages mentioned by the poet in the
continent of Africa’s history?
10. Why
does the poet say that liberty has bitter taste?
11. How
does the poet picturise the pre-colonial Africa?
12. How
does the poet picturise the colonial period of Africa?
MODULE: 4-DRAMA
HARVEST
Manjula Padmanabhan
About the playwright
Manjula
Padmanabhan (born 1953) is a playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and
children's book author. She has also written such plays as Lights Out! (1984), Hidden Fires (solo by Rashi Bunny) The Artist's
Model (1995) and Sextet (1996). Born in Delhi to a diplomat family in 1953,
she went to boarding school in her teenage years. After college, her
determination to make her own way of life led to various kinds of works in
publishing and media related fields. She has authored a collection of short
stories, called Kleptomania. Her most recent book, published in 2008, is titled
"Escape". Apart from writing newspaper columns she also created comic
strips.. Before 1997 (the year in which her play Harvest was staged) she was
better known as cartoonist and had a daily cartoon strip in The Pioneer
newspaper.
Harvest
The theme of
Manjula Padmanabhan’s play ‘Harvest is the purchase and sale of human organs.
It is “dark bitter savagely funny vision of the cannibalistic future that
awaits the human race”. It becomes a
parable of what will happen when the rich of the first world actually begin to
devour bits and pieces of the 3rd world poor”.
The Plot
‘Harvest’ is a
futuristic play, set in the year 2010.
There are quite a few technical wizardry introduction in the play,
including travels in hyper reality and revolving strobe – like TV modular
suspended from the ceiling. There are references to donors and receivers. The playwright has taken and molded the grin
relatives of life into a 21st century table in which powerful
questions are thrown open like the limits of poverty and wanted materials. In
the opening scene of the play we can find a cramped single room tenement in
Mumbai Chawl, which forms the setting of the play. The play is occupied by a
typical 4 member family. Om prakash is a tense and jobless clerk. He is desperately trying to support his
family. His wife Jaya is resigned to the
life of insecurity and privatization.
She looks worn out and much older than she really is. Om Prakash’s old
mother, instead of being a benevolent and encouraging influence, is frustrated,
ill-natured and sarcastic.
Om Prakash’s younger brother, Jeethu has already given up all hopes of
getting a decent employment, and he now works, on the sly as a male prostitute.
Poverty, starvation, unemployment, food shortage and conflicts haunted the
people.
In order to ward off starvation these
desperate men like Om Prakash join queue outside the ‘Inter planta
services”. This is a contract firm, a
hi-tech company, which chooses able bodied candidates to donate their organs to
western buyers who live in perpetual fear of old age, accidents or the faintest
signs of bodily decay. Once the donor
commits his life to a wealthy receiver, the receiver pays for the donor and his
family’s upkeep. But there are conditions.
The donor is now kept under constant surveillance by means of regular
long distance call on a video module.
Thus the donor’s privacy is invaded; he has to adjust with various
things that force him
to change his life style according to the whims of the
buyer. Thus the contract involves some
kind of futuristic slavery.
Having
committed himself to such a job Om prakash now enters into such a world.
He planned to sell his organs to a person called Ginny for a
short period of comfortable living. Ginny is an irresistibly gorgeous blonde
far off in California and Om Prakash’s only acquaintance with her is through
the video screen. He sells his organs to save her.
After making the deal, Om Prakash’s
apartment undergoes dramatic external changes.
It is transformed into an air-conditioned aesthetic but utilitarian bed
cum-living room with a well fitted kitchen and toilet. Now Jaya sits painting her nails all day
long, and cryptic old Ma is glued to the new television set. But behind Ginny’s
seductive video image there lurks a Mephistopheles.
By the time Ginny is ready to claim her part as a receiver.
Om Prakash betrays his brother Jeethu, Jeetu betrays his beloved, and Ma sinks
in to the abyss of T.V. However, the inter plaza service comes to the house of
Om and Jaya as soon as Om gets a job. He says he got it very easily though
there were six thousand men waiting under the sun for the job. So even without
his own knowledge he becomes the donor of organs for the receivers of first
world countries. Jaya is forced to pretend as his sister as it is mandatory
that a donor must be bachelor. The guards and agents of the inter planta
services take over the entire charge of Om’s house. The inter planta service is
using Om only as a decoy to get Jeetu, younger and more energetic, who has much
healthier organs.
Structure and Characters
The
play has 3 acts. The structure is traditional, comprising of acts and scenes.
The
characters are also divided into 3
categories Donors, Agents and guards and Receivers. Om, the young 21 years old has been laid off from his job as a
clerk, and is the bread Winner of his small family. His wife Jaya, 19 is
passionate and spirited. Om’s mother, a stooped, scrawny old woman, always
quarrels with Jaya. Om’s younger brother Jeetu works as a prostitute. These
comprise the
Donor group of characters. The guards and agents are a group
of commando like characters. They are space-age delivery persons and their
uniforms are fantastical like the costumes of waiters in exotic restaurants.
Ginny and Virgil are
the receivers. Ginny is the blonde, white skinned epitome of an American style
youth goddess. Her voice is sweet and sexy. But then she is only “Virtual” and
not real. Virgil, on the other hand, is the real aspect of Ginny. He is never
seen on stage, but is said to have an American cigarette commercial accent-
rich, smoky attractive and rugged. Of the six characters in the play, two are
physically absent. This makes the situation all the more gripping. These two
characters- Ginni and Virgil- ultimately, merge and become one character.
Sometimes Ginny’s face flickers on a polygon which the inter planta has
installed in the flat of Om and Jaya.
However, the various relationships- between
brother in law and sister in law, between daughter in law and mother in law
have been brought out by the playwright. She also unmasks a wide range of
emotions from sexuality to vicious back biting and whispering cowardice. As the play progresses, the characters’
strengths are destroyed –
psychologically, morally and then physically. The audience is moved by the
helplessness of their condition. Everything appears extremely pessimistic. When
the time comes for Om Prakash to ‘donate’ his organs, he is
transformed into a frightened, cowering wreck, without even
the magic dignity of Doctor Faustus. Om prakash falls so low that he is ready
even to betray his own brother. Jeetu, in turn, is not able to resist the offer
given by the video image of Ginny. But the image later turns out to be nothing
but a computer-animated wet dream. Actually the receiver is a man named Virgil,
who has deliberately misled Om prakash and his family by projecting the image
of seductive and lovely Ginny. All along, it is Virgil who has been conversing
with them and not Ginny. Jeetu is caught in the deception and donates his
organs willingly, and is destroyed. Strange enough, Old Ma chooses for herself
what could be called ‘electronic annihilation’. Among all the characters, the
only one who is able to eventually stand up to and resist the inhuman condition
is Jaya. She realizes that she has lost her entire family – her husband, her
mother in law and her brother in law Jeetu. Now it is her turn but she prefers
to hang herself instead of donating organs.
QUESTIONS
1.
The play ‘The Harvest’ won the ___________ prize/award
2.
What is the central theme of the play, ‘The Harvest’?
3.
Attempt a character sketch of
Jaya
Ma
Om Prakash
Jeethu
4.
The interplanta service
5.
Consider the play ‘Harvest’ as a futuristic play?
6.
The contemporary social relevance of the play ‘The
Harvest’
7.
Colonization of the body in ‘The Harvest’
8.
Who wrote the play ‘harvest?
9.
What is the theme of the play ‘harvest’?
10.
Harvest is a futuristic play justify
11.
Who are the characters in the play ‘harvest’?
12.
The role of ‘inter planta service . 13. What are the three categories of characters
mentioned in the play ‘harvest’?
14.
Who are the two physically absent characters in the
play ‘harvest’?
15.
The play ‘Harvest’ won………………. Prize/award
16.
The character of Jaya
17.
Om Prakash
18.
The contemporary relevance of the play ‘Harvest’?
19.
The post colonial aspects in the play ‘Harvest’?
FICTION
KILLING TIME
Nasibu Mwanukuzi
About the writer
The award winning
Ras Nas aka Nasibu Mwanukuzi is a musician and poet from Tanzania living in
Oslo, Norway. Ras Nas repertoire is a mixture of reggae and soukous (or rather,
muziki wa dansi) with lyrics in both Kiswahili and English. The music is self
composed as well as self arranged. Currently,
his band comprises of musicians from Norway, Sweden, Ivory Coast, Congo
Brazzaville and USA.
Ras Nas has so far produced three critically acclaimed
albums: Cut You Loose (1997),
Dar-esSalaam (2007) and Double Focus (2010). In 2010, he was awarded the
Tanzania Red Carpet Award for Best Solo Artist.
Ras Nas has participated in many prestigious festivals and
has also toured extensively in Scandinavia.
Killing Time
Killing Time is a
short story penned by Nasibu Mwanukuzi, a Tanzanian writer, poet and musician.
Nasibu is known for his experiments in music in which he blends African music,
reggae with a dash of poetry. He has attempted to present the real charms of
African music and African culture. Settled in Norway, Nasibu has brought forth
various collection of his artistic enterprise and has performed for the African
legend Nelson Mandela, when the latter made a visit to Norway. At intervals, he
works with short stories as well. Killing
Time, Days of Summer, and The Stolen Amulet
are some of his best short stories.
In Killing Time,
as in his other short stories, we are introduced to the experiences of a young
narrator who witnesses his surroundings. The young narrator is cast in half
westernized settings where they brood over the intricacies of modern life; they
expect something unexpected to happen. In Killing Time, as the title suggests,
the narrator is spending his time lazily (a similar case can be read in Days of Summer, in which the narrator is
thinking of death in the early morning hour while the whole world is busy
working) at a cafe and notices the arrival of a man of fifty or above, who
finds a seat for himself away from the crowd and sits with a glass of beer. As
time goes by, the narrator notices that the man is lost in thought and is
seriously involved in some personal dilemma. He idly fabricates many reasons
for the moody temperament of the stranger. Meanwhile, as he closely watches the
stranger, he suddenly realizes that he too is being observed by a third person.
Gradually, the cafe is filled with smoke and he can see the old man amidst. The
old man is trying to rise up. It is difficult to say whether the old man really
rose with the table or the narrator imagined him so. This disenchantment with
reality is a mark of Nasibu Mwanukuzi’s prose writings. In Days of summer, the author observes the reality outside, and
suddenly gets detached from the normal and its significance. As he writes,
"Then suddenly,
all of a sudden, and without warning, everything turned sad, the man with the
yellow flag looked older, grey and sad.”
In Killing Time,
it seems that Nasibu is interweaving reality with magic. This can be an
instance of adding the color of fantasy to a newly emerging culture which is,
from an African point of view, dull and dry. Once western culture is
introduced, its rationalized logic makes the illogical, supernatural, primitive
indigenous cultures insignificant and leaves the natives in hand of a culture
which is artificial, rational and detached. So, Killing Time can be considered
as an attempt of the narrator to bring the harmonious life of the earlier
culture and myths.
The use of magical elements in prose and fiction is an
important strategy of post-colonial writers. Writers from Africa and South
America including Marquez, use magic realism as an extension of realistic
narration which somehow ignores the real element of non-western cultures. The
interweaving of myth/fantasy with realistic narration is an effective mode of
narration in postcolonial discourse. Realism was the dominant mode of narration
of nineteenth century novels which presupposed many euro-centric notions with
it. African and Latin American writers want to break these assumptions of
realism and brought forth many elements of magic into the text which was one
way of introducing their cultural heterogeneity into the main stream. Black
American writers like Toni Morrison too attempted to put magic realism as a
mode of narration in her fiction. This synthesizes the western mode of
narration with the rhythm of the indigenous.
Nasibu Mwanukuzi presents the virility of a
culture that caters to the imaginative realm of man. It is common among African
writers to contrast the objective, dull world of the present with the mystical,
harmonious days of the past. Nasibu too contrasts the artificiality and
dreariness of the present (where the purpose of living is missing, as the title
suggests) and the colorful, imaginative, harmonious life of the ancient Africa
is recalled.
QUESTIONS
1.
Who wrote the story ‘Killing Time’?
2.
What was eating the mind of the stranger in ‘Killing
Time’?
3.
What was the stranger in ‘Killing Time’ mercilessly
devoured by?
4.
The significance of the title ‘Killing Time’.
5.
How did the narrator describe the stranger in the story
‘Killing Time’?
6.
How did the narrator describe the stranger?
7.
From where did the narrator happen to see the stranger?
A SCARF
Carold Shield About
the writer
Carol Ann Shields was an American-born
Canadian author. She is best known for her 1993 novel, The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as
well as the Governor General's Award in Canada. Shields was the author of
several novels and short story collections, including The Orange Fish (1989), Swann (1987), Various Miracles (1985) ,
Happenstance (1980), and The Republic of Love (1992). She was the recipient
of a Canada Council Major Award, two National Magazine Awards, the 1990 Marian
Engel Award, the
Canadian Author's Award, and a CBC Short Story Award. She
was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1998 and was elevated to
Companion of the Order in 2002. Shields was also a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Canada and a member of the Order of Manitoba.
SUMMARY
The story begins
with the declaration of Mrs. Winter, the narrator that ‘two years ago I wrote a
novel’. It was her first novel. She is a middle aged woman. Her novel is
described as ‘a fresh, bright spring time piece of fiction’ by the Publisher’s
Weekly. Her novel’s title is ‘My
Thyme is up’. When it was published, she did not know who
was buying her item. Mrs.Scribano, her publisher opined that young working
girls may buy it and she ventured that the novel is gnawed by loneliness and
insecurity.
Her husband Tom and her children are her support. She has
three daughters-Nancy, Chris and Norah. They were happy about the book because
they were mentioned by name in People Magazine’s interview.
Mrs. Rita Winters lives on a farm outside Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, with her husband who is a family physician. Among her three
daughters, Norah is the most literary girl. Both Nancy and Chris are interested
in advanced science .The novel won the Offenden Prize. It recognizes quality
and honors accessibility. After the ceremony function, she said goodbye to the
family and travelled to Washington as she was offered three book city tours by
her publisher. She decided to go for shopping as Norah’s birthday is coming up
within a week’s time. Norah longed for a beautiful and serious scarf. She
decided to buy Norah the perfect scarf. Norah wanted something in a bright blue
with perhaps some yellow dashes. As she moved from one boutique to the next,
Mrs. Winter began to form a very definite idea of the scarf that she wanted for
Norah. The scarf became an idea, it must be brilliant and subdued at the same
time, finely made, but with a secure sense of its own shape.
Norah had always been
a bravely undemanding child. Once she was four or five she told her mother how
she controlled her bad dreams at night. Then at last Mrs. Winter had the sight
of Norah’s scarf, it flowed into her view. It was patterned from end to end
with rectangles each subtly out of alignment; blue, yellow, green, a kind of
pleasing violet and each of these shapes was outlined by black colour. Sixty
dollars was its cost.
In Baltimore,
Mrs. Winters had to meet her friend Gwen who was with her in the same women’s
writing group in Lancester. Five years ago, she became writer-in-residence for
a small women’s college in Baltimore. Gwen had made sacrifices for her young
student husband. She had her navel closed by a plastic surgeon because her
husband complained that it smelled “off”. This navel-less state, more than
anything , became her symbol of regret and anger.
Mrs. Winters met Gwen at the Café Pierre.
Gwen had changed considerably in dressing and appearance. Her head was covered
and Mrs. Winters wondered if Gwen was
undergoing chemotherapy and suffering hair loss. But her face was fresh. After
talking for sometime about the book, she showed the scarf to her. Gwen commented
that ‘You invented it, created it out of your imagination’. She was so happy to
hear such a comment from Gwen. She almost cried herself. She had not expected
anyone to understand how she felt. Mrs. Winters watched Gwen roll the scarf
back into the fragile paper. She took her time, tucking in the edges with her
finger tips.
Then she slipped the parcel into her plastic bag, spilling
more freely now. She thanked Reta, “You don’t know what you have given me
today”. She wondered why the scarf “ half an ounce of silk” was so important to
Gwen. She looked at Gwen and then down at her hands, her wedding band, her
engagement ring, a little diamond thingamajig from the sixties . She thought of
her three daughters and her mother –in-law and her own dead mother with her
slack charms and her need to relax by painting china.
At the end of the story Mrs. Winters
philosophises that none of us is going to get what we wanted. We ask questions
ourselves, endlessly, but not sternly enough. The world is not ready for us; it
hurts her to say that. We are too kind, too willing, too unwilling too,
reaching out blindly with a grasping hand, but not knowing how to ask for what
we do not even know we want. This is how the story ends.
QUESTIONS
1.
How did publisher’s weekly describe the book ‘My Thyme
is Up’?
2.
How did New York Times Review describe novel by Mrs.
Winters?
3.
Who is Tom?
4.
Who are the three daughters of Tom and Winters?
5.
Why were the three daughters of the narrator of ‘A
Scarf’ very happy?
6.
Who is the narrator in the story ‘A Scarf’?
7.
Who wrote the story ‘A Scarf’?
8.
The novel ‘My Thyme is Up’ won ____________ Prize?
9.
What is the dream in the story ‘A Scarf’?
10.
The success of ‘My Thyme is Up’?
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