Joseph Michael Sommers, has written an article on one of Judy Blume’s most iconic coming of age story; Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret. In this article he speaks about the nature of this novel and how it speaks to young adolescent females. He speaks about the connection the novel has between the protagonist and the reader. Sommer’s argument is that the protagonist breaks the fourth wall and seeks outside intervention to her troubles in her life. The author speaks about the boundaries Judy Blume has tested. One is “sororal dialogism” in the novel, and how he will show it as a recast of avuncularism. Also how sororal bond can be found and interpreted in the novel. Another issue is, how Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, has been described as a problem novel. As well as what position the reader plays. One thing that stood out was that Sommers in the title of the essay puts “reader” in the spot where the word “God” should be.
The author uses first person point of view in his article, to connect with his audience, but his connection is not a personal one he wants it to be one of logic. He puts emphasis on the fact that we as reader are somewhat put in a position, that if we are the same gender and have gone through the same adolescent troubles (puberty, menstruation, boys, etc), we are compelled to identify with the main character. Sommer’s states:
The reader reads in order to feel sorrow for the protagonist in a manner the reader can assimilate. Yet, it seems that the nature of Margaret’s thoughts is inherently dialogic or, to work with Duke’s terms, empathic: neither Margaret nor the reader uses the text in order to solicit pity from the other. What function would a “pity party” serve a reader by herself? To the contra...
... middle of paper ...
...oached. Such as: how the reader is seen as having so many roles, and to which one do they take. This article is well- written and he has some significant points about the novel. Sommer’s tactics of constructing his argument in a logical manner was the right thing to do. It helps the reader to separate their feelings that they may have had when reading the novel, and look at facts. In some parts of the article he used reader-response, which helped you to question what others have said about this novel. Although there were parts where his argument is not clear, it did consist of some valid points.
Works Cited
Joseph Michael Sommers. "Are You There, Reader? It’s Me, Margaret: A Reconsideration of Judy Blume’s Prose as Sororal Dialogism." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 33.3 (2008): 258-279. Project MUSE. Web. 31 Mar. 2012. .
...ile forms an image of her character. By comparing her eyes with marbles the reader can construct that Mrs. Merkle was expressionless and had cold, glazed hard eyes. For every instance that Mrs. Merkle is mentioned the phrase is repeated, in the last occurrence to excuse her from not crying for the loss of Mrs. Bylow. Wilson’s adaptation of a motif in her writing shapes the character’s conscience based on their emotional reactions to a situation.
...onally transposing indirect to direct quotation, putting words into people mouths and blending two separate eye witness's accounts. How can one read a novel for knowledge gaining purposes when the structure appears so flawed? The use of modern and old English are combined in the sentence structure. The highly academic vocabulary not only is confusing, but breaks the flow of the book when that is the evident purpose for the format of the book. The confusing order in which Starkey retells events and the ineffective and useless information that is put in for building character personalities.
People one can never really tell how person is feeling or what their situation is behind closed doors or behind the façade of the life they lead. Two masterly crafted literary works present readers with characters that have two similar but very different stories that end in the same result. In Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby the Scrivener” readers are presented with Bartleby, an interesting and minimally deep character. In comparison to Gail Godwin’s work, “A Sorrowful Woman” we are presented with a nameless woman with a similar physiological state as Bartleby whom expresses her feelings of dissatisfaction of her life. Here, a deeper examination of these characters their situations and their ultimate fate will be pursued and delved into for a deeper understanding of the choice death for these characters.
Those living in today’s world are constantly bombarded with the stereotypes and distorted images of a consumerist society. As a result, they often struggle with a loss of identity because mass media try to dictate what they should want to be and do. Zora Neale Hurston tackles this age-old search for self-discovery in her fictional frame story Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie Crawford tells her best friend, Pheoby, about her quest for her own voice, despite setbacks in the form of relatives, two husbands, and entire towns that attempt to silence her. From a young age, Janie yearns for enlightenment; however, the roles Nanny, Logan Killicks, and Joe Starks force upon her prevent her from reaching selfhood until she meets and falls in love with Tea Cake, her equal.
Writing a journal from the perspective of a fictional eighteenth century reader, a mother whose daughter is the age of Eliza's friends, will allow me to employ reader-response criticism to help answer these questions and to decipher the possible social influences and/or meanings of the novel. Though reader-response criticism varies from critic to critic, it relies largely on the idea that the reader herself is a valid critic, that her critique is influenced by time and place,...
pity in the reader by reflecting on the traumatic childhood of her father, and establishes a cause
By writing personal accounts of their lives, many women of the nineteenth century used the emotion of sympathy to share their feelings. According to Rosemarie Garland Thompson, "Sympathy is an effective rhetorical strategy in women's writing because it combines and embodies the fundamental elements of the feminine script." (Thompson 131) By using sympathy in their writing, Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Barret Browning, both nineteenth century women writers, made their readers want to help reform the South.
Many might argue that sentimentalism is an act of weakness or that it’s an emotion that should only be expressed by the female sex. However, that is not true; the act of sentimentalism actually helps to prove the moral quality of a character or person. This is eminent in the story Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson in which the reader comes across many characters being sensible or acting sentimentally towards others.
The sympathy for Cholly evoked in The Bluest Eye from the reader is not deserved. By definition, sympathy means feeling pity or sorrow for the distress of another, or compassion. The skillfulness of the author manipulates the reader into feeling a certain way towards particular characters. Sympathy for characters – Cholly being no exception – derives from an author’s ability to use words and the construction of the story to lead a reader into a certain emotional direction. The reader is the prime reason the author constructs a story. Because all authors are completely aware that an audience exists for their stories, authors are, in turn, completely aware that their words can manipulate their readers. It is this awareness that allows all sentence structures and idea portrayal to be the product of an author’s manipulation. Because there exists an audience, there exists someone to persuade or influence. Thus, an author, like Morrison, builds a textual relationship between the characters in her story and that of the reader digesting her story. Morrison, like all authors, understands that the reader searches for a...
And readers are thus exposed to the exploitation and extortion that goes on in this cycle of sympathizers. While the gathering of the women is supposed to be a period of preparing the widows for their confinement, it turns to a period of financial exploitation of the widows. Ramatoulaye succinctly expresses her displeasure,
It is the first time that Lizabeth hears a man cry. She could not believe herself because her father is “a strong man who could whisk a child upon his shoulders and go singing through the house.” As the centre of the family and a hero in her heart, Lizabeth’s dad is “sobbing like the tiniest child”She discovers that her parents are not as powerful or stable as she thought they were. The feeling of powerlessness and fear surges within her as she loses the perfect relying on her dad. She says, “the world had lost its boundary lines.” the “smoldering emotions” and “fear unleashed by my father’s tears” had “combined in one great impulse toward
Kelley, Mary. Introduction. The Power of Her Sympathy. By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993.
In the past two centuries, western mainstream cultures have subscribed to the belief that crying is commonly associated with femininity, regardless of one’s gender (Warhol 182). A considerable amount of literature, including Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, has been considered by critics as effectively using “narrative techniques” to make readers cry (Warhol 183). Emphasizing on these matters, Robyn R. Warhol, the author of “Narration Produces Gender: Femininity as Affect and Effect in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple”, analyzes the usefulness of the novel’s narration approaches, focusing on the meaning of Nettie’s letters to Celie and especially the fairy-tale unity in Celie’s last letter. Using The Color Purple as illustrated example, refusing to consider the accounts of gender and sexuality, the author suggests that the applications of culture’s “feminine mythologies” in the novel give readers chances to experience the physical (openly weeping) and emotional (identify self with the character) effects of femininity (Warhol 186). Although Warhol’s interpretations have successfully carried out the novel’s sentimentality within the context of culture and other novels, there is still a general lack of comprehensive examples that illustrated after each of her arguments. In order to corroborate and extend on Warhol’s central argument, the surprising factors of the novel’s ending combines with the elements of foreshadowing in Celie’s first confrontation with Albert about Nettie’s letters, Celie’s relationship with Shug, and the ugly truths about racism and sexism showing through Nettie’s and Celie’s letters should be considered as significant in creating the novel’s sentimentality.
In A Room of One's Own the narrator begins an exploration of women in literature. She attempts to answer many questions regarding women. The first being why is literature about women written by men. She also critiques the scholarship of the great men of literature.
Mrs. Mallard’s repressed married life is a secret that she keeps to herself. She is not open and honest with her sister Josephine who has shown nothing but concern. This is clearly evident in the great care that her sister and husband’s friend Richard show to break the news of her husband’s tragic death as gently as they can. They think that she is so much in love with him that hearing the news of his death would aggravate her poor heart condition and lead to death. Little do they know that she did not love him dearly at all and in fact took the news in a very positive way, opening her arms to welcome a new life without her husband. This can be seen in the fact that when she storms into her room and her focus shifts drastically from that of her husband’s death to nature that is symbolic of new life and possibilities awaiting her. Her senses came to life; they come alive to the beauty in the nature. Her eyes could reach the vastness of the sky; she could smell the delicious breath of rain in the air; and ears became attentive to a song f...