Lady Lazarus

I've never read Silvia Plath before, but the history behind her poetry and the personal connection she had with them is remarkable. Lady Lazarus is Plath's epitaph; it's her way of justifying and honoring her death. The poem reads like an ancient hymn and it is filled with morbid descriptions of Plath's hatred for herself and the rest of humanity.

Plath describes her body as being "my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade" implying that her skin is very pale and seemingly dead. She compares herself to Lazarus through her apparent zombie-like skin and physical features. She is the walking dead ready to die at any moment.

The ending of the poem is what really stunned me. Plath wants to start a new life and end the current one she has. She says, "Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware / Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air." Plath is charging headlong into the multidimensional beings and ready to challenge them if they chose to persecute her. She calls herself a phoenix, the bird of fire, which is used to symbolize the renewal of life and the start of her new journey.

I feel that there is almost too much going on in this story and that my analysis is terribly shallow, but a story of this depth has to be put into simpler terms in order to understand the bits and pieces that make it up. Incredible stuff.

The Dutchman

Another story about racism? What sets this story apart from the others is the flirtatious almost positive appearance of the story, which correlates oppositely to the shocking ending. The story starts off with Lula and Clay being friendly and flirty with each other, both clearly seem to like each other. Clay, initially is put off by Lula's aggressiveness, but eventually starts to get into her as the story progresses.

Lula's character is a roller coaster of emotion; she starts off being relatively subdued but still aggressive and flirty, and as she sees that Clay is starting to feel attracted to her, turns wild and crazy. I'm not sure I really understand the significance of Lula's mentality. Clay eventually gets fed up with Lula's insanity and pompous attitude. Lula seems to be flirting with Clay so she has reason to kill him. She is trying to get a rise out of him so he will act on it.

At this time, minorities were starting to gain more love and freedom among the middle-class white communities, but this story shows that there was still incredible amounts of persecution and oppression. Lula is the embodiment of pure racism.

The Man Who Was Almost a Man

Another coming of age story? The thing that really striked me about Wright's story The Man Who Was Almost a Man was it's lack of detail. Wright never really describes the setting of the story in great detail (compared to someone like O'neil). I feel that this only adds to the desolate landscape and the overall atmosphere of the story. Wright only tells us that our narrator is a young farmer walking through a field. The bleak and almost apocalyptic atmosphere of the landscape is used to describe the nature of the world and of the people at the time, as well as the void that our character, Dave, longs to fill by "becoming a man." The gun in the story represents the power that Dave needs to gain the respect he feels that he deserves. We see in the story that he clearly isn't ready to fire a gun when he has to force himself to do it. "Hell, he told himself, ah ain afraid. The gun felt loose in his fingers; he waved it widly for a moment. Then he shut his eyes and tightened his forefinger." Dave ruins this when he accidently shoots his boss's mule in a very sad and gruesome scene. When confronted about the dead mule, Dave lies. One thing about being a man is owning up when you make mistakes, and Dave doesn't seem capable of doing this yet. The story ends with Dave convincing himself that he is capable of being a man. In a fit of rage, he runs off into the woods where he hid the gun and fires off the rest of the barrel. Believing that he now has the power to be a man and to gain respect, he hitches a ride on a nearby train to escape the prison that he has made for himself. But, does Dave really become a man this easily? He now has the power to, "Kill anybody, black or white". Wright is saying that having great power isn't what makes a man, it's what he does with this power. "Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man..." (For some reason, I can't post this without blogger running all the paragraphs into one large paragraph. Sorry that it looks so ugly!)

Barn Burning

Above all, I think Barn Burning is about the relationship between a father and his son. Abner Snopes appears to be a pyromaniac and has some anger management issues. He continually beats his children and forces them to do things for him that people would these days find unnatural. During the height of the climax of the story, Abner, in a fit of rage, decides to burn down his boss's barn with the help of his two sons. What kind of a parent would involve their own children in such terrible crimes? Abner tells his sons to fetch the oil to help burn the barn down. His son, Sarty Snopes, does what his father tells him to do, but he realizes that what his father is asking is not morally right. This speaks volumes about the relationship between a father and his son during the time period. A child looked up to his father and felt that he was more of an authority figure then he was a loving parent. Someone told me about how their grandfathers used to say to their children "I don't want your approval, I just want your respect." These days fathers still have their authority and commanding rule, but a child also knows when his or her father is doing something that is morally wrong. Few parents who have problems of some sort rarely involve their children. Sarty's rebellion against his father could be looked at in a couple of different ways, but I personally feel that it is his "rite of passage" into the adulthood. The ending of the story shows Sarty fleeing his family and "never looking back." Which symbolizes his departure from the controlling ways of his father and the shelter of his family. He is a man now.

The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Now this is a love poem. The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter expertly captures the true love of a wife after she was forced too. The poem is filled with incredible beauty that mimics the River Merchant's wife love for her husband.

"At fourteen I married My Lord you. / I never laughed, being bashful. / Lower my head, I looked at the wall. / Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back." This line shows the nature of how their love was formed. The wife was originally distant with the idea of marrying this man, probably because she was forced to do so for political or economical reasons, yet only a year later, she "stopped scowling". She changes and grows to realize that she does love this man.

The husband leaves (to find more work, I assume) to a place "by the river of swirling eddies". The swirling eddies can be a metaphor for the turmoil and danger that he went through, and judging from the fact that he's been gone for five months, he may have died. Even "the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead" is a metaphor for the disappearance of him.

But the wife never stops loving. After all these signs of loss and death, she refuses to believe that her beloved husband has died. She is so persistent that she tells him to let her know if he is on his way back, so she can meet him and be with him sooner.

This is a really loving tale of a wife's loyalty to her husband. It reminds me a lot of Odysseus's wife, Penelope, when she refuses to belive that Odysseus is dead, and he was away for nearly 20 years! Penelope tricks her way out of picking a suitor out of incredible love and loyalty to Odysseus even though he can't possibly be alive.

Fog

Carl Sandburg's Fog amazed with it's incredible detail and description being such a short poem. These are the sort of poems that I like, ones that seem to have no initial meaning other then what is painted, yet with each reading, more and more is taken out.

Anyone who has seen John Carpenter's The Fog (The original one, not that horrible remake they did a few years back) knows how genuinely terrifying intense Fog can be. Sandburg perfectly captures this by describing the movement of the fog as being cat-like. He then continues the anthropomorphism by describing the cat (or the fog) overlooking the harbor, quitely, and moves on.

By comparing the fog to a cat, Sandburg expertly opposes the creepiness. Cats are usually associated as being cute, fluffy, cuddly, but they also have that nasty, intelligent, introverted, and that not-a-care-in-the-world attitude that resembles the effect of a fog.

A fog doesn't really do anything besides distort our world and force us to drive slower than usual and it could be said that our way of life is nothing but "distorted reality".

The Yellow Wall-Paper

I've fallen in love with Psychological horror stories. From Poe to Lovecraft, and now to Gilman? Based on what we've read so far in class, this came as a pleasant and refreshing surprise. It reminded me why American literature is to be studied. After reading pages and pages of "local color" diologue about living in American and obtaining the "American Dream", I'm already getting tired of it.

What makes The Yellow-Wallpaper stand out is it's discription. The way the narrator describes the yellow wallpaper is eerily creepy. Early in the story, the narrator says, "The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight."

This can also be seen as a metaphor for the narrator's own psyche, as it slowly transforms and decays into insanity. With each passing day, the wallpaper consumes her, and in the end, she eventually is the wallpaper.