In the short story, “The Semplica Girl Diaries”, George Saunders describes a world that reflects similar aspects of the American Life, however focuses more on materialistic ideals. The narrator, a forty year old man, describes the struggles of life as a middle class family who lives among a community of wealth, especially for his pre-teen daughter among her affluent peers. A central sign of money within the community are lawns, particularly, the SG’s or Semplica Girls, young immigrant women who hang across yards on a micro-line that runs through their heads. Saunders, through conflict within the narrator and between him and his daughter about these SG’s, uses satire to comment on how the mistreatment of oppressed persons is easily ignored because
What would one expect to be the sentiment of a young women who worked in the Lowell textile mills? It is just such a depressing story; and the sad heroines are the young women of Lowell - Lucy Larcom- who Stephen Yafa portrays in his excerpt “Camelot on the Merrimack.” A perception through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old Lucy Larcom reveals that, “For her and the other young girls, the long and tedious hours they spent tending to demanding machines robbed them of their childhood.” The imagery in “Camelot on the Merrimack,” from Big Cotton by Stephen H. Yafa disclose the working conditions in those sordid mills.
Coming from an “unconventional” background, George Saunders is readily able to relate to the circumstances the everyday working laborer goes through (Wylie). However, Saunders has an advantage to spread out his ideas and concerns about life in the U.S. via his short stories and novellas. Because of neoliberalism and capitalism and its correlation to the huge wealth gap in the U.S. Saunders focuses his protagonists’ view from a proletariat standpoint, allowing the reader to see the life of consumerism has impacted our society. Saunders does not use conventional methods to portray this reality. Instead, Saunders emphasizes on the “absence” of certain moral human characteristics in order to take the reader away from viewing into a hero’s looking glass— to set a foundation of a world where our morals become lost to our materialistic and inherent need of money (Wylie).
“By Permit Only,” represents that money can buy everything, even a permit to abuse others. Mr. Manning sexually abuses his employee Mrs. Robinson. Mrs. Robinson says, “I said trying to ignore Mr. Manning’s hand on my thigh. His sexual harassment permit (on file at the main office) didn’t cover actual genital contact, so I didn’t have to worry about him going much higher, Thank God” (Bisson 200). The boss bought a permit to make sexual contact with his employee. Mrs. Robinson has to take the sexual harassment to keep her job. Bisson writes, ‘“This guy’s a poet,’ mused Mr. Manning, running his hand along the crack that separates my buttocks. I tried to ignore him (jobs are scarce these days) and kept looking out the window” (Bisson 201). This gives the impression that lower class people have no power to escape this abuse. It is almost a punishment for being lower class. Even the children of high class people abuse the children of low class people. Timmy, the crippled child of Mrs. Robinson, cries, ‘“They had their papers, Pop!’ whined our bruised, battered, blubbering baby boy. ‘They whipped out and waved it in my face and then it was whack whack whack”’ (Bisson 204). Even the kids are affected in this low class. No one is left out. This story even goes to the next level of cruelty by allowing children to buy permits to beat up crippled children, like Tim in this quote. With the cruelty of beating up a crippled child to sexual harassment this satire explores how money can buy anything including physical
In “Citizens: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine the audience is placed in a world where racism strongly affects the daily American cultural and social life. In this world we are put as the eyewitnesses and victims, the bystanders and the participants of racial encounters that happen in our daily lives and in the media, yet we have managed to ignore them for the mere fact that we are accustomed to them. Some of these encounters may be accidental slips, things that we didn’t intend to say and that we didn’t mean yet they’ve managed to make it to the surface. On the other hand we have the encounters that are intentionally offensive, things said that are
The latter work exposed what is was like to be a “slave girl.” Before this work came out no one really knew how these women were treated. The author, Harriet Ann Jacobs, pointed out that thes...
Yet the similarity between these two stories raises some interesting questions about how we read Carver. That he is adored as few late-century American writers are is not news -- as Bloom points out there's almost a cult of Carver. Readers treasure not only his taut, bleak, deeply moving short stories but the legend of his life, as well: unhappy, alcoholic, stifled by frustrating poverty and saddled with the overwhelming responsibilities of teenage parenthood ("[My wife and I] didn't have any youth" he told Simpson), Carver's singular talent didn't have room to develop until relatively late. His eventual triumph over adversity, a story of late, spectacular blooming against all odds, has given him a rare hold on his readers' affection. Carver chronicled the lives of the lumpen proletariat and the demoralized white working class with a sensitivity and eye for detail unmatched in his contemporaries and, many would argue, his followers. He is commonly thought of as a truly American writer, perhaps stylistically indebted to Sherwood Anderson, Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway (he himself suggested the link to Hemingway in his book "Fires"), but in a sense sui generis -- a talented, sensitive soul who rose up out of the deadening laundromats and strip malls of the great, dreary American suburban wastelands and wrote beautiful, sad stories in clipped, stripped prose. The minimalism and domestic realism of his short stories made his work read very differently from the cerebral literary styling of his contemporaries, the university-ensnared postmodernists. But perhaps Carver's work wasn't as unfettered or as American (in his literary influences, at least) as all that.
In “Queens, 1963”, the speaker narrates to her audience her observations that she has collected from living in her neighborhood located in Queens, New York in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. The narrator is a thirteen-year-old female immigrant who moved from the Dominican Republic to America with her family. As she reflects on her past year of living in America, she reveals a superb understanding of the reasons why the people in her neighborhood act the way they do towards other neighbors. In “Queens, 1963” by Julia Alvarez, the poet utilizes diction, figurative language, and irony to effectively display to the readers that segregation is a strong part of the American melting pot.
Growing up as the young child of sharecroppers in Mississippi, Essie Mae Moody experienced and observed the social and economic deprivation of Southern Blacks. As a young girl Essie Mae and her family struggled to survive, often by the table scraps of the white families her mother worked for. Knowing little other than the squalor of their living conditions, she realizes this disparity while living in a two-room house off the Johnson’s property, whom her mother worked for, watching the white children play, “Here they were playing in a house that was nicer than any house I could have dreamed of”(p. 33). Additionally, the segregated school she attends was a “one room rotten wood building.” (p. 14), but Essie Mae manages to get straight A’s while caring for her younger sibli...
As you can see, T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain introduces us to two completely opposite couples whose backgrounds correspond with their different beliefs and values of what the overly sought out American dream is. While immigrants seek out basic necessities in order to thrive and survive in America, many citizens to the states live overly shallow and superficial lifestyles, where what they already have never truly satisfies them. Both the Rincóns and the Mossbachers have their own image of the American dream and eventually realize that their dreams were nothing but false impressions. Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher are an unpleasant illustration of the American Dream, whereas Cándidó and América Rincón are a tragic example of how people struggle to gain that ultimate dream.
She was not a master of style, plot development or characterization, but the intensity of feeling and aspiration are evident in her narratives that overrides her imperfections. Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, written in 1984, and Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, published in 1925, are both aimed at adolescent and adult audiences that deal with deeply disturbing themes about serious social conditions and their effects on children as adults. Both books are told in the first person; both narrators are young girls living in destitute neighborhoods; and both young girls witness the harsh realities of life for those who are poor, abused, and hopeless. Although the narrators face these overwhelming obstacles, they manage to survive their tough environments with their wits and strength remaining intact. Esperanza, a Chicano with three sisters and one brother, has had a dream of having her own things since she was ten years old.
Set during the Great Depression in America, The Parsley Garden by William Saroyan, is a thought-provoking short story about how an impulsive decision leads to humiliating and traumatic consequences for the protagonist, eleven-year-old Al Condraj, the stubborn and curious son of a poor Armenian immigrant woman. After attempting to steal a hammer from a store, Al’s strong desire to make things right and seek redemption leads to a transformation in his thinking and a realization of his place in society. This is a society which is quite different from the calm milieu of Al’s mother’s parsley garden. The garden is a sanctuary where Al is able to find peace in
In the novel, The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros describes the problems that Latino women face in a society that treats them as second class citizens. A society that is dominated by men, and a society that values women for what they look like, and not for what is on inside. In her Novel Cisneros wants us to envision the obstacles that Latino women must face everyday in order to be treated equally.
The story of the five-year-old boy is reminiscent of Emmett Till, the teenager lynched in 1955, his body was sunk in the river. Both of their bodies were found “ravaged” (209) and left in the water for days. Tommy Odds shared a story with Lynne of the nine-year-old black girl raped by a white man, “they pulled her out of the river, dead, with a stick shoved up her” (179). There is a habitual pattern of mourning, the tears building up, waiting for the next black person to die unjustly. The women at Saxon college act similarly, by retelling the stories of Wile Chile, Louvinie and Fast Mary they are “ritualizing their suffering, the Saxon women recognize that their own lives are part of a continuum. Their circle includes those women that have suffered before them.” (43 Downey) Although, the black community is always looking for something to stop this cycle, they protest violently and non-violently, attempting to vote, sharing stories or praying. Meridian, when the activist Medgar Evers was assassinated, planted a wild sweet shrub bush in the gardens at Saxon College and when she carried the body of the five-year-old boy “it was as if she carried a large bouquet of long-stemmed roses” (209). As if she was taking flowers to a grave of a
Stanton uses various emotional techniques to grab the attention of the audience and create personal connections, through specific diction, metaphors, and alliteration. Stanton’s vocabulary (including the phrases “But to have drunkards, idiots… and silly boys fully recognized” and “the battlements of righteousness are weak against the raging elements of sin and death”) evokes compelling mental images that turn the audience against men and their injustices. Her powerful phrasing pinpoints the exact places where the audience is weakest, the issue of incompetent men, their right to vote, and the absence of true righteousness in America. Stanton’s vernacular isn’t the only device used to create an emotional response, however. Her use of metaphor is just as strong. She describes America’s situation as follows: “thorns of bigotry and prejudice… banners will beat the dark storm clouds of oppression.” This comparison between prejudice and thorns, words that both hold a negative connotation, hits hard in the audience’s mind. These metaphors connect the entrapment women are exposed to everyday to a physical version of thorns. This gives a clear mental picture of the hurt and pain caused by unequal rights and dramatizes the issues at hand, bringing emphasis ...
Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen: An American Lyric provides racially charged commentary on the internal and external conflicts of black experiences in America. She uses various formats - poetry, short essays, and artwork- to articulate her ideas and nuance the various themes over which this conversation takes place. By addressing Rankine’s discussion on Serena Williams, the themes of racialization and colonialism interact with one another to produce a discourse on black womanhood in environments that prioritize whiteness. This discussion includes dialogue on the presence of black women’s bodies in spaces that are constructed as white, and on the trope of the “angry black woman” and how they intersect to subjugate Williams. Rankine explores the themes of racialization and colonialism as mutually constructed and dissects how they operate blatantly and covertly by looking at Serena’s experiences in the setting of tennis.