ipl-logo

Essay On The Bean Eaters

433 Words2 Pages

The True Meaning of Gwendolyn Brooks’ Bean Eaters

Bewildered by the racial and economic difficulties among her fellow Chicagoans in 1960, Pulitzer Prize Winner Gwendolyn Brooks wrote the authentic poem The Bean Eaters. In her poem The Bean Eaters, Brooks alludes to the lasting effects of poverty, isolation, and social injustice. Therefore, while maintaining an eye on her allusions, in this analysis, I will analyze the characters, mood, and theme of Brooks’ popular poem.
In her poem, Brooks has two central characters; she refers to them as an old yellow pair. Moreover, beyond associating their skin with the color yellow, which doesn’t identify their race or sex, Brook alludes that the old pair is poor. By using phrases like “they eat mostly beans,” “plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,” and “rented backed rooms,” not only is the reader able to deduce that the pair is …show more content…

In her poem, Brooks wrote about two characters whom, we speculate, weren’t originally poor; yet, throughout the piece, she writes without any ambition or call for change for them. This is Brooks way of displaying the prideful and classist culture of the fifties and sixties. In 1960, being on government assistance was worst than just being poor; in the words of many financial analysis of that time, there is no “free” meal. Henceforth, the prideful and classist culture discouraged many deprived citizens to seek the government for help; ultimately this led to numerous social injustices.
Therefore, bewildered by the racial and economic difficulties among her fellow Chicagoans in 1960, Pulitzer Prize Winner Gwendolyn Brook wrote the authentic poem The Bean Eaters. In her poem The Bean Eater, which had two unidentified central characters, Brook alludes to the lasting effects of poverty and isolation. The gloomy poem was meant to show people of the sixties, and even of today, how classism rouses social

Show More
Related

Immigrants In Barbra Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

773 Words | 4 Pages

Have you ever wondered what all immigrants have in common? In the Bean Trees by Barbra Kingsolver it tells about some immigrants from Guatemala. The immigrant experience is classified by not giving up, escaping a past worse life, and making sacrifices. In the bean trees it follows Esparanza, and Estevan two immigrants from Guatemala.

Read More

Literary Analysis Essay On The Bean Trees

743 Words | 3 Pages

Clive Waswa Ms. Meara Honors English 16 December 2016 Literary Analysis: The impact of Poverty “The Poverty line doesn't measure Poverty, it measures extreme Poverty," (Shapiro Marcy). Barbra Kingsolver’s book The Bean Trees, Focusses on the social justice issue Poverty. The Main character Taylor Leaves Kentucky, to escape poverty, she was determined to be different from all others who dropped out of school and had children. She dreamt of being different and achieving something with her life. In the The Bean Trees, Barbra Kingsolver challenges the idea that people in poverty are lazy and never work.

Read More

Social Justice Issues In Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees

1132 Words | 5 Pages

Individuals have different views of the world and to be fair this world has many flaws that individuals can’t see because they’re not willing to see those flaws. These flaws are seen by Barbara Kingsolver, the author of The Bean Trees. In the society, there are many social justice issues that people think it is normal for it to be happening, those social justice issues can be child abuse, racism, over-sexualization of women and poverty. Barbara Kingsolver is an author of the book called The Bean Trees which is a story about the journey of Taylor from Kentucky to Arizona. This journey of hers brings out a purpose to show these social justice issues within the society we had and we still have.

Read More

The Working Poor Invisible In America Analysis

628 Words | 3 Pages

Carelessly, the working middle and the high class people always forget about what the poor working class has to do in life to survive. In a passage from the novel, The Working Poor Invisible In America, David Shipler compares the poor working class wages to the amount of food they are able to buy. Shipler is able to creatively inform the audience using description, exemplification, and cause and effect what the life a poor working class citizen does everyday.     David Shipler shapes an image in the minds of all of his readers with his selective word choice. As a result of not having the money to pay for food, parents are forced to let their children starve, and as a result those children start looking “listless”.

Read More

Apush Dbq Essay Examples

1185 Words | 5 Pages

Readers can infer that poor people were deprived of food and possibilities because of the strong use of pathos and imagery. Also, the substandard jobs were reserved for the poor because they were ineligible of equal opportunities because they were deemed uneducated. Americans still view poor people as being uneducated and wrongfully inferring that as the cause of their poverty. This incorrect thinking leads poor people to have less rights than others because they have to

Read More

Examples Of Generational Poverty In Sonny's Blues, By James Baldwin

913 Words | 4 Pages

Generational Poverty Poverty has been around for numerous years. Poverty can be a generational problem if people let it. James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” and David Joy’s “Digging in the trash” both show that families in poverty do not have it easy, the children will live in poverty unless something is done, and people either find a way of escape or stand up against it. In the short story, “Sonny’s Blues” Baldwin shows how the lack of monetary resources affects many generations.

Read More

Michael Harington's How I Discovered The Truth About Poverty

570 Words | 3 Pages

In the article “How I Discovered the Truth about Poverty” Barbara Ehrenreich gives her view in poverty and explains why she think Michael Harington’s book “The Other American” gives a wrong view on poverty. She explained that Harrington believes that the poor thought and felt differently and what divides the poor was their different “culture of poverty.” Ehrenreich goes on to explain on how the book that became a best seller caused so many bad stereotypes on the poor that by the Reagan era poverty was seen as “bad attitudes” and “faulty lifestyles” and not by the lack of jobs or low paying jobs. And they also viewed the poor as “Dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock.”

Read More

Social Inequality In To Kill A Mockingbird

1067 Words | 5 Pages

The adjectives, ‘yellow and rotten’, also make the readers think as if Boo Radley is poor and low in a social hierarchy. Although Jem, who created this monstrous image of Boo Radley, did not exactly know how Boo actually looks like, he believes that Boo is inferior to them. Thus, Jem even did not feel guilty of ridiculing Boo. This

Read More

The Literary Context Of To Kill A Mockingbird

4088 Words | 17 Pages

The poorest white families in Maycomb County were the Cunninghams and the Ewells, who were living behind the town 's garage dump. “ ' '... The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them the hardest. ' '”18 For example, Walter Cunningham and Burris Ewells ' characters are both bullied at school, since they do not have the money for lunch or clean clothes. “...Walter Cunningham was sitting there lying his head off.

Read More

The Joy Of Cooking Poem Analysis

936 Words | 4 Pages

She has to add “an apple-onion stuffing” (13) just to make it interesting. The metaphor of this poem creates a vivid image of the brother's and sister's personalities, and how the character is able to deal with them. The author creates a cannibalistic environment with her cooking terms, but is able to make it light hearted through the overall

Read More

Theme Of Social Inequality In To Kill A Mockingbird

1169 Words | 5 Pages

In the novel, ‘To kill a mockingbird, Harper Lee demonstrates the small, imaginary town, the Maycomb County, as a place where racism and social inequality happens in the background of 1930s America. Not only the segregation between whites and blacks, but also the poor lived in a harsh state of living. As Scout, the young narrator, tells the story, Lee introduces and highlights the effects of racism and social inequality on the citizens of Maycomb County by using various characters such as Boo Radley, Tom Robinson, and Mayella Ewell. Firstly, Harper Lee portrays Boo Radley as a victim of social inequality through adjectives and metaphor in the phrase, “There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten;” ‘Long jagged scar that ran across his face’ tells us that Boo Radley has stereotype about his appearance, which forces to imagine Boo as a scary and threatening person. The phrase, ‘yellow and rotten’ make the readers think as if Boo Radley is poor and low in a social hierarchy, as he cannot afford to brush his teeth.

Read More

Rhetorical Analysis Of What Is Poverty Jo Goodwin Parker

507 Words | 3 Pages

In the passage “What is poverty?”, the author Jo Goodwin Parker, describes a variety of things that she considers to portray the poverty in which she lives in. She seems to do this through her use of first-person point of view to deliver a view of poverty created by a focused use of rhetorical questions, metaphors, imagery, and repetition to fill her audience with a sense of empathy towards the poor. The author’s use of first person point of view creates the effect of knowing exactly what she is feeling. “The baby and I suffered on. I have to decide every day if I can bear to put my cracked hands into the cold water and strong soap.”

Read More

Imagery In Mary Oliver's Wild Geese

842 Words | 4 Pages

Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” was a text that had a profound, illuminating, and positive impact upon me due to its use of imagery, its relevant and meaningful message, and the insightful process of preparing the poem for verbal recitation. I first read “Wild Geese” in fifth grade as part of a year-long poetry project, and although I had been exposed to poetry prior to that project, I had never before analyzed a poem in such great depth. This process of becoming intimately familiar with the poem—I can still recite most of it to this day—allowed it to have the effect it did; the more one engulfs oneself in a text, the more of an impact that text will inevitably have. “Wild Geese” was both revealing and thought-provoking: reciting it gave me

Read More

Examples Of Social Inequality In To Kill A Mockingbird

740 Words | 3 Pages

Social inequality is overlooked by many. It affects so many of us, though we have yet to realize how extreme it is. Lee argues in this novel how much stress social inequalities put on the black and white races throughout the 1930s. Although, social inequalities did not just affect different races, it also affected poor people and family backgrounds. These are proven in the novel multiple times through Boo Radley, Tom Robinson, and the Cunninghams when the book is looked at more in

Read More

Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman Analysis

3192 Words | 13 Pages

It uses the narrative device of exaggeration to expose some of the negative elements of consumer society, making both funny and bitterly satiric. It provides an early glimpse of the witty characteristic of Atwood’s writing style proclaiming a theme that will be a central concern in all her later work-feminism. The Edible Woman is an exposure of an economically sound woman taking time to be aware of her marginalization as the ‘second sex’. Marian, the protagonist, digs deep into the social conditions of the ‘archetype’ followed by ultimately researching at the ‘individuation’.

Read More

More about Essay On The Bean Eaters

Related Topics

Open Document