Laurie Halse Anderson’s realistic fiction book Speak depicts the life of Melinda Sordino, a 9th grader who called the police at a party after being raped and is now a social outcast. The pain from the memories of being raped keep her silent as she struggles through a powerful depression and the problems that go with being in high school. Anderson uses mirrors as a motif throughout the story to portray the stages of depression Melinda goes through. At the start of the story Melinda leads a very depressed hidden life; Anderson uses the mirror to represent this.
Similar in nature, lesser offences such as tormenting are found in Susan Faludi’s writing, “The Naked Citadel”, where the student population contains cadets that are mentally unhealthy. Because The Citadel has an all male student body, it becomes easier for them to share the same distaste for females wanting to join The Citadel. The distaste that they carry for females is shown through the inhumane, continuous tormenting that the students inflict on each other. Susan Faludi describes some of these acts, where “The beaten knobs were the women, ‘stripped’ and humiliated, and the predatory upperclassmen were the men, who bully and pillaged” (85). The men feel need the power to hurt others due to their seclusion of females, ironically again since
Web. Ikeda, Tom, and Ellen Kuwana. "Sites of Shame, Background." Densho.org. Densho, 2008. Web.
In the book “The Things They Carried” two stories show that shame is a strong feeling that human beings experienced and can make humans do things that they wouldn’t do. In the story "On The Rainy River '' By Tim O’Brien the example below shows what the feeling of shame can do mentally to a person “my conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame.
During Christmas, Tan is worrying about how Robert is going react about their culture. Tan’s mom sees that she does not like the culture of her family in front of Robert. Furthermore, her mom does not want her daughter to be ashamed of her family and her culture. The best way for Tan’s mom to teach her a lesson is to follow their culture on her way to cook and act, and she says something unique, “Your only shame is to have a shame.” Its change the way she thinks after year later (111).
The emphasis on Connie’s expectations suggests that her appearance and behaviour are constantly scrutinized, allowing for the revelation of the theme of women’s objectification and the pressure to conform to societal ideals. It signifies how patriarchal norms strip women of their individuality and independence, reducing them to objects of the male gaze and societal judgment. By comparing Connie’s behaviour and appearance to that of her sister, it becomes evident that women are constantly being compared and evaluated against each other based on their adherence to traditional gender roles. This also reinforces the notion that a woman’s worth is measured by her ability to meet these expectations, creating a sense of vulnerability and self-doubt. The contrasting expectations placed on Connie and her sister enable Oates to effectively highlight the gender inequality and oppressive nature of patriarchal norms, shedding light on the challenges faced by women in society.
Kingston reveals another example of how defying gender roles can lead to a better life in her story “Shaman.” As her mom is
There is a sharp contrast between shame and self-acceptance. One must psychologically determine which they will let dictate their actions. Shame tends to impede one’s own progression of this self-acceptance. This is an apparent feature in Dorothy Allison’s “Trash”, as she navigates between the two interchangeably by giving the reader a taste of her personal life. In this autobiography she allows the reader to delve into the personal and dark times in her life.
Patriarchal societies silence women by reinforcing structural violence against women through projecting discriminatory gender roles that often place limitations on how far they can go. Zora Neile Hurston, an African American author, Maxine Hong Kingston, an Asian American author, and Louise Elriche, an author with Native American heritage speak up against the struggles that women of color encounter on a regular basis by exploring themes of Sexual assault and rape. In “Their Eyes Are Watching God '' by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie, a female protagonist, grew up in a society that discriminated against women of color by their gender and race. In the memoir “The Women Warrior” by Maxine Kingston, Kingston, the narrator, three books portray the devastating
The kind of shame she felt was as she said deep, This means that this is a shame that she has felt for a long time but now its been exposed to the world. In an article on the emotion
As Wolfe stated, “only when these ghosts are gone will a woman be free to find her real voice.” The voice that Virginia used that day speaking to those women was not the voice of an oppressed woman, but the voice of a woman that wanted things in life like a Persian cat, and a motor car and she did not let anything stand in her way. Between the speech by Judy Brady, the essay by Roxane Gay and the speech by Virginia Wolfe, Virginia by far had the most well-presented, and the most inspirational. The lecture focuses on overcoming obstacles in life and not just on the challenges themselves.
On the surface, the song “Pretty Hurts” is about a pageant girl who comes to terms with her insecurities and learns to accept her natural beauty; however, when one looks deeper, the audience understands that the speaker is criticizing society’s beauty standards and its effect on young women. This message is shown through the author’s use of various rhetorical devices including diction, metaphors and
Shame is a good thing that everyone growing up should learn because when a person is shamed they can learn from it and become more sophisticated and even gain success in it. Dick Gregory is a well-known Comedian and social activist Dick Gregory writes in the chapter “shame” from his autobiography, “I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to the school for that. ”(Gregory 164). He was raised amongst poverty in his young age and wasn’t aware or paid any noticed or cared about being ashamed till that day he went to school.
CHAPTER-V THE HEALING POWER OF FOLK CULTURE Images of women healing ill or injured women, or of women healing themselves, have become one of the central tropes in contemporary African American women’s novels. Authors such as Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison utilise the trope of healing to measure past and present oppressions of women of color and to discuss what can and what cannot be healed, forgotten and forgiven. Much focus is put on how healing could be accomplished. Some hurt, they say, is so distant that it cannot be reached; other hurt goes so deep that there may be no possibility of healing... some pain can only be healed through a reconnection to the African American community and culture (Gunilla T. Kester 114)
This novel is also autobiographical. Throughout history, women have been locked in a struggle to free themselves from the borderline that separates and differentiate themselves from men. In many circles, it is agreed that the battleground for this struggle and fight exists in literature. In a
