Ellen Foster Identity Analysis

The creation of Ellen Foster’s Identity

A novel with an unexpected plot twist can be seen through Kaye Gibbon’s first and very successful novel, Ellen Foster, demonstrating the hardships of a young biracial girl in the 1900s. Through the use of subtle topics we can detect the characteristics Gibbons uses from the African American criticism to embed the hidden message for the audience. Through the use of diction used by and directed towards Ellen and foreshadowing, the reader can establish the character Ellen has formed for herself after the emotional journey she is forced to embark on. Using African American Criticism to analyze Ellen Foster, we can view the social and cultural situation that feed the experience of racial oppression that

However the expected love from a grandmother is not given to Ellen in this novel, instead it turns into an abuse of power that later turns into “racism (the unequal power relation that grow[s] from the sociopolitical domination of one race by another and that result[s] in systematic discriminatory practices)” (Tyson 360). Her “mama’s mama” placed Ellen in the cotton field to work alongside the rest of the “nigger[s]” as to pay back some unknown debt (Gibbons 61,63). After a hard days work Ellen would walk back to her grandmother’s home and eat dinner alone. The regular salary given to “the colored workers” was not given to Ellen, in fact no salary at all was given to Ellen except the “room and board” her grandmother provided (Gibbons 66,67). This was placed in order to establish a dominance over Ellen as her owner, guardian, and as a member of the predominant white race. As Ellen’s only immediate family member alive, and forming nothing more than a bond between a master and a servant shows the bases of Ellen’s growth as a

A “Double consciousness (the awareness of belonging to two conflicting cultures)” becomes evident when her grandmother points out that Ellen shares similar physical features as her father but Ellen wants to believe she “look[s] just like [her] mama” (Tyson 362, Gibbons 68). However a negative connotation is built around this idea when her grandmother becomes agitated when she was “just enough of his eyes or nose to tease her oh she boiled violent inside” (Gibbons 68). We find the protagonist clinging onto the idea that she does not share similar characteristics with her father nor appear like him as she believes he is a “big wind-up toy of a man” (Gibbons 3). Receiving this negative backlash from her grandmother truly not desiring to appear like her father, Ellen enters into an emotional conflict. She continuously “checks in the mirror to see if [she] had changed into him without [her] knowing or feeling it” and decides she “would jump off the bridge if [she] was different from [her] old self” (Gibbons 68). The reader can interpret this as sprouting Ellen’s desire to embrace herself and her actions as her own and