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We Wear The Mask Dunbar Analysis

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In the poem We Wear the Mask Dunbar considers that African Americans directly after the Civil War had to put on a metaphorical mask to the shame and guilt of hiding their identity. But Dunbar thinks that this just continues to evoke more pain and suffering upon the wearers of such masks as the “world dreams otherwise.” Though they have their freedom, what is freedom from slavery when they are enslaved by their emotions? Just as the speaker puts on a mask because he feels threatened by a world that rejects him for the color of his skin and fears ending up alone, people in our society put on a mask of reserve and presentation because they feel threatened by social norms and fear the possibility of ending up alone, but rather than let these fears take hold those who let the mask fall away and reveal the identity beneath are most-in-touch with their emotions and themselves. I slide my yearbook down the table like it’s no big deal, but more and more it seems like people are signing me off. The looping curl of the pen is the elegant goodbye my classmates can offer in words but would never bother to say in person. Words are written down. Words leave a record. Words on paper may fade like ink, but the words that people say leave indentations on the heart. As my yearbook is passed around, I turn my head away, …show more content…

I wasn’t getting people to sign my yearbook out of sentimentality, I wanted to know how they truly felt for once. The messages were of course a paper trial of artifice. Those faces all were masks “that grinned” and spewed “lies.” You’re nice and smart each message said in varying degrees, the safest most annoying words in the universe that were flat out drivel. I knew, and they knew that I was neither of those things, at least not to them. The poem We Wear the Mask generalizes that everyone has on a disguise that projects them in a better light to hide uglier deeper truths, but what it doesn’t say is words can do that

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Some people in high school are pretending to be at a big masquerade party. They wear masks pretending to be someone different from who they really are, and convince the people around them to see there mask as their true self. Many of the teenagers in the book Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes wore masks to hide who they really were. The students revealed their true identities and how they felt by writing and performing poetry on Open Mike Fridays in their English class. The main character, Tyrone Bittings, is a judgmental, confident, observant teen that reveals who he truly is through learning and listening to poetry.

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He wants people to avoid thinking that developing only one true self identity is healthy. A mask allows an individual to see his or her full potential by not having a true identity. Masks have multiple identities based on the certain situations and environments (circumstances) the person is having(undergoing). I agree with Gergens interpretation (assertion) and his psychological

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974 Words | 4 Pages

These themes are common in most of the stories and poems read during this semester. It has enabled me to realize the similarities in many of the books people read everyday and what lessons are learned. These lesson can go from simple to complex. The freedom for some ethnicities in some environments can be hard because they can be easily discriminated against because of their race or their color. The masks people wear are to hide their true feelings, so they become something that people will become more accepting of and not judge them.

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851 Words | 4 Pages

“We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes-.” This quote is from the poem, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar which is a poem about the struggle that Paul Laurence Dunbar’s family went through during their lives being enslaved. This quote represents the role that a mask can play in covering up true self. By wearing a mask, a person is covering up their unique features. Also, they are not letting anyone get to know them as well as hiding their persona from the public.

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360 Words | 2 Pages

African Americans were not treated fairly during slavery. African Americans are just like everyone else and deserve the same right as everyone else, no one should be treated differently by their skin color. Frederick Douglass and Paul Dunbar both talk about slaves and being treated unfair. They both use personal experience to support their ideas. Paul Laurence Dunbar uses conflict in “we wear the mask” to get his point across about African Americans being treated unfairly after slavery ended.

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526 Words | 3 Pages

The novel To Kill A Mockingbird exposes the reality behind the mask that people wear to protect themselves from ideas and thoughts that they have but don’t want to accept because they are scared to be vulnerable to society and possibly themselves. Throughout Harper Lee’s creation, though the mask is not directly shown or stated, it is implied in many situations. Maycomb county wears a mask that narrows their vision so they are unable to see other people’s side of things. The upper class white families in Maycomb are the most prone to this mask regarding to the fact everyone is below them, especially the black community.

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802 Words | 4 Pages

Such personification mirrors Dunbar’s use of figurative language, which relates the poems in more ways than one. Dunbar touches on human features such as cheeks and eyes in his poem but also uses a spiritual element to advance his point of view. Furthermore, “We Wear the Mask” was written in 1896; a period in American history that was post-slavery but still had widespread discrimination. The spiritual connotation within Dunbar’s poem can allude to African American churches and/or the hymns slaves sung on plantations. Nevertheless, the struggle of African Americans is a symbol of both presented

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1218 Words | 5 Pages

In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears.

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212 Words | 1 Pages

In “We Wear the Masks,” Dunbar displays the oppression and pressure that the black community faced in the late 19th century. With remaining unjust laws and unforgetting former slaves, Dunbar evaluates the saddened and fake expression that his community faced. His title indicates that the newly freed black population in America could not truly be themselves but had to wear a “mask” that made them acceptable to the white population. Dunbar unites his community by projecting them as a whole encountering a new form slavery together. The poem aims to express how the black population was forced to hide their continued suffering in order to not endanger their newly gained freedom.

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1000 Words | 4 Pages

The oldest found mask is from 7000 BC, and experts believe it was used for rituals and ceremonies. Masks have an important cultural context in history, and as the use of masks has progressed, humans have adopted masks into other forms of entertainment and festivities. In present times, with better understanding of human psychology, society has come to understand that people wear emotional “masks” as well. Masks have a somewhat important context in both Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”. Both works describe masks as a way to hide one’s true self from everyone; Dunbar, however, depicts masks as an emotional barrier to cover up one’s true emotions or feelings, while Golding uses masks as a physical object to hide behind.

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1202 Words | 5 Pages

Yet Doniger asserts that “masks” are not what we use to cover up who we truly are, because we possess no genuine or default self, no “monolithic core”. “Masks” are not cover-up impersonations but instead self-impersonations, for our “self” is comprised of these masks. In other words, a mask is not a consistently weathering veneer that may be scraped off to expose an invariable interior. It is a veneer that covers a body of veneers, so that one mask is no more constant or genuine than

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914 Words | 4 Pages

Masks hide the truth and obscure the facts. They form a barrier between what is real and what is an illusion. Yet, during from the moment blacks were brought to this continent in chains, to the moment they were granted civil rights in the 1960’s, masks were a method of survival. Another way of life for African Americans was the practice of signifying. Signifying is mostly seen in the black literary tradition as a means for African Americans to take back power from the white through misinformation and deception.

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696 Words | 3 Pages

He utilizes the mask when he says that “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford…” (Fitzgerald ##). He wants everyone including Nick Carraway, the narrator, to know that he is a valuable and worthy person. However, it backfires when Nick Carraway says “I knew why

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681 Words | 3 Pages

The poem I chose to analyze is We Wear the Mask, written by Paul Lawrence Dunbar in 1896. Its theme is about hiding our true feelings and emotions, and lying about who we are. When looking at Dunbar’s life history, and the political context at the time, we understand that he efficiently uses this theme in order to talk about how black people have to hide how they feel about their social status and the treatment they receive from white people. He conveys the theme to the audience thanks to a clever word choice. Indeed, he talks about “grin” and “smile”, using facial expressions as a description of the mask (Dunbar, lines 1 & 4).

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2388 Words | 10 Pages

Socially constructed identities can often make those that don't fit within those identities feel alienated, like an outside, or that they have to conform to society’s idea of what their identity is supposed to. Often, these constructed identities do not include identities that intersect. In Audre Lorde’s “Age, Race, Class and Sex” she talks about how those who are oppressed have “to be watchers, to be familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection” in order to survive. We can see this happening when Mock says, “hiding myself for that brief period allowed me to operate under a guise of normality that made me feel temporarily secure” (Mock 98).

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