ipl-logo

Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse Of A Negro Analysis

1000 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Psychoanalytic theory and play

Through her dramaturgy, the playwright Adrienne Kennedy portrays African American female protagonists who suffer psychic fragmentation. Feeling alienated, dislocated and rejected by the surrounding oppressing society, they try to form their self-integration by relating to the white dominating society. They try to establish identity wholeness by rejecting the black heritage that they feel it as threat. According to Melanie Klein’s theory, the infant is born with life and death instincts. These instincts create anxiety that the infant tries to deal with by using mechanisms of defense, such as splitting and projective identification. The infant, in order to deal with the anxiety he feels, projects it in an object outside the self as a good or evil project. After dealing with these anxieties the infant learns how to unit these splits and how to deal with them as a whole object. The infant projects the death instincts into an outside object which is called the persecutory object. This persecutory object is felt to be bad and threating the infant ego. The ego also projects the life instinct into a good and idealized object that the child identifies with. “The infant’s aim is to try to acquire, to keep inside and to identify with the ideal object, seen as life-giving and protective, and to keep out the bad object and …show more content…

Torn between the two cultures, Sarah rejects her black heritage and aims to identify herself with the white background. E. Barsely Brown explains “Sarah occupies a liminal space between blackness and whiteness, and thus can find neither a place to belong in either race nor a unified conception of self” (283). Unable to find herself identification Sarah splits into four selves. Through the play, Sarah and her four selves try to achieve a whole identified self, but they fail and Sarah by the end of the play commit

Show More
Related
746 Words | 3 Pages

The shock of the explosion becomes the first of many incidents against the black community that Davis experiences, impacting her own prejudices against white people, “White people’s hatred of us was neither natural nor eternal. She knew that whenever I answered the telephone and called to her, ‘Mommy, a white lady wants to talk to you,’ I was doing more than describing than the curious drawl. Every time I said ‘white lady’ or ‘white man’ anger clung to my words” (Davis 79). Davis’ experiences with the bombing of a member of her local community changed her view of white people and moved her towards her eventual activism and work to help other black people in her community. Anger clings to Davis as she continues to see how the world seems to be stacked against her, just because of the color of her skin, and the institutions she once followed seem to be doing less to protect her rights, naturally leading to the exploration of new ideas and movements to find community and

Read More
367 Words | 2 Pages

Irene tries to fit into the mold of what is expected of a women in society but strays away from her true identity. Irene, being able to “pass” as white, chooses to remain loyal to her roots and embrace her black identity but she is not satisfied. Irene considers herself to be high ranked in the black society because she is married to a doctor, Brian, and judges other women by their husband. “Gertrude, Irene thought, looked as if her husband might be a butcher” (25).

Read More
803 Words | 4 Pages

Cassie Logan, the central protagonist of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor, has, all her life, been shown confidence, love, and pride in herself, her history, and, most importantly , her family. During this year, though she is only nine years old, Cassie is shown the real world of cruel racism and supposed white superiority. Many people treat blacks as if they are inferior to whites, such as Miss Crocker, the Night Men, and Lillian Jean Simms. These people have specifically impacted dark-skinned Cassie; they have tried to degrade her, and destroy her pride and confidence. Throughout my essay I will be discussing how the characters listed above have tried to reduce Cassie’s worth--only because of her skin color-- and if they have succeeded or not.

Read More
1385 Words | 6 Pages

In the book, there are significant racial tensions and racial divisions in society. Young Black women like Lauren, the primary character, must find their way in a society where they face prejudice and marginalization. In the story, racism is shown as a persistent menace in a society where one's character or aptitudes are more often evaluated than the color of one's skin. Unfortunately, this is a problem that persists in modern culture. The work emphasizes the consequences of institutionalized racism, which persists today.

Read More
1551 Words | 7 Pages

Passing, a novel by Nella Larsen, addresses the issue of race by telling the story of two African American women - Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield - who represent different aspects of passing1. In the novel, passing refers to the process of crossing the color line, where a light skinned person who belongs to the black racial community enjoys white privilege2. However, people who pass struggle with double consciousness as they long to honor their race without necessarily being associated with it3. The novel is highly invested in ambiguity to show the fluidity and complexity of race, and how it paves the way for passing4. Passing illustrates the struggle African Americans face with their unchosen race and their attempt to control their identity

Read More
1006 Words | 5 Pages

All throughout Tatum’s article she puts the emotional hardships for the kids in every argument she makes. Tatum uses a personal encounter from a young girl who said she always found it odd that she was the only black girl in her honors classes. (p13) This story particularly plays on the emotions because the girl adds that her school was 35 percent black. To the reader hearing that a girl is a standout in her classes is extremely sad because we all have memory of ourselves being alone and this story triggers those emotions. Knowing the girl is the only one of her racial identity in her class could be intimidating, and make her feel alone or as if she doesn’t belong, and that is what triggers the reader’s emotions.

Read More
732 Words | 3 Pages

In the The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow, the author expresses that labels and single stories about race through Nella and Rachel, say more about the world that attempts to identify them than who they are. Rachel struggles with her identity when she moves to the United States. Race did not define Rachel or Nella in Germany where Rachel’s dad, Roger was stationed. People characterize Rachel and Nella by their race and not what type of person they were. This says more about society’s single stories than what the labels actually represent.

Read More
509 Words | 3 Pages

Zora Neale Hurston, the author of How It Feels to Be Colored and Me explains through her essay how she created her identity by refusing to victimize herself in societies hands regarding race. She does this effortlessly with the use of diction, syntax, parallelism, and metaphors. Hurston expresses culture and racial pride while overlooks the differences between ‘whites’ and ‘colored’ and introduces her unique individual identity as a colored woman. The essay starts off by Hurston contrasting her childhood to her adult life.

Read More
778 Words | 4 Pages

Linda, the protagonist of Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Sethe the protagonist of Morrisons Beloved both experienced the intersecting cultural myths of motherhood and blackness that shaped them into who they are. Black women were ultimately viewed as inferior and unfit to be mothers by society at the time, which led to their end of the social hierarchy. However, despite the chains society has placed on them, Linda and Sethe were able to break off the chains of slavery and the ideologies of motherhood that plagues the stigma of how women and mothers are treated through maternal acts. Linda had a problematic experience as at the time she was a slave.

Read More
1682 Words | 7 Pages

Through this part of the novel, where narrators are switched up (epistolary form), the life of the African American woman and newer cultures are compared to the older, more traditional cultures of an actual African tribe. While Celie still endures forms of abuse, Nettie reveals her own struggles while in Africa. Here, Black women are still seen as inferior. In this tribe halfway across the globe, women are doing the same as Celie. Endless labor, caring for children, and more.

Read More
999 Words | 4 Pages

As a very young girl, her mother’s ex-boyfriend molested and raped her. Her rape took up a big part of her life, as it never really completely left her. Early on in her life, she branded herself as a bad person, but as she grew and matured, she realized she no longer identified as a bad person, but rather a strong, independent, intelligent woman who takes pride in her black

Read More
869 Words | 4 Pages

To be specific, she situates the imminent feminist struggle by highlighting the legacy of slavery among black people, and black women in particular. “Black women bore the terrible burden of equality in oppression” (Davis). Due to her race, her writing focuses on what she understood and ideas that are relevant to black females. Conversely, since white men used black women in domestic labor and forcefully rape these individuals. These men used this powerful weapon to remind black women of their female and vulnerability.

Read More
585 Words | 3 Pages

Student loans have always seem to be a controversial topic. Many people are in agreement and disagreement over the opportunity to student loans. Student loans can be a great advantage to many students, but it can also drown them in an immense debt, that will follow them for many years. The more we analyze this perspective, we are able to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of student loans. There is a variety of perspectives on student loans, some involving annual salaries, interest rates, and commodity.

Read More
3280 Words | 14 Pages

Afro-American women writers present how racism permeates the innermost recesses of the mind and heart of the blacks and affects even the most intimate human relationships. While depicting the corrosive impact of racism from social as well as psychological perspectives, they highlight the human cost black people have to pay in terms of their personal relationships, particularly the one between mother and daughter. Women novelists’ treatment of motherhood brings out black mothers’ pressures and challenges for survival and also reveals their different strategies and mechanisms to deal with these challenges. Along with this, the challenges black mothers have to face in dealing with their adolescent daughters, who suffer due to racism and are heavily influenced by the dominant value system, are also underlined by these writers. They portray how a black mother teaches her daughter to negotiate the hostile, wider world, and prepares her to face the problems and challenges boldly and confidently.

Read More
1029 Words | 5 Pages

Dee approaches culture by decontextualising it, while Maggie and Mama relate to it with a kind of ‘organic criticality’. The former stance is mere rhetoric and the later one is womanist. In one of her interviews, Alice Walker identifies three cycles of Black Woman she would explore in her woman’s writing: 1.

Read More

More about Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse Of A Negro Analysis

Related Topics

Open Document