Stereotypes in Things Fall Apart and The Lover
According to Oxford Dictionary, stereotype is a preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person or situation (Oxford). But in reality it is more like a subtle form of bias, such as those based on people's gender, race or occupation. For example, Americans are generally considered to be arrogant and materialistic while Asians, on the other hand, are expected to be shrewd but reserved. Obviously, not all Americans are arrogant and not all Asians are shrewd. So, if one just assumes what a person is like and don't look at each person as an individual, he or she is likely to make errors in estimates of a person's character. Such biases are easily ignored, yet are a fact of life. These biases can affect how people see others, as well as themselves, which may lead to unexpected consequences. Thus, stereotyping can influence the communication and understanding between people, usually in a negative way. To examine the side effect brought by stereotyping, I will go through Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Duras’ The Lover and analyze the roles played by stereotype. The protagonists of both books are set in a background, to which they do not originally belong or where is colonized by foreign invaders. Therefore, stereotype becomes a mutual theme and plays an important role in these two books.
In The Lover, Duras tells the largely autobiographical story of a fifteen-year-old French girl’s amazing love affair with an older Chinese man in Vietnam, the place colonized by France during the 1930s. “She” was just a young girl attending a boarding school, living with an abnormal family, which had a life poor as beggars and violent as gangsters; “he” is the son of a Chinese millionaire, and settled in the colonies as one of “the financiers of Chinese origin who own all the working-class housing” (Duras 33). They meet each other on the ferry crossing the Mekong and on that day they start an unusual relationship. Such plot sounds like an ordinary love story—“She” is fragile and helpless while “he” is the symbol of power and wealth and has a strong sense of protecting her. They fall in love at the first sight and look forward to their everyday meeting. Then how could “The Lover” become an exception from the general standard love relationship? The phenomenon of cross-racial dating is too superficial to make the story rebellious, but the real consciousness behind the race—which known as stereotype—works.
What Is a Stereotype? The definition of a stereotype is any commonly known public belief about a certain social group or a type of individual. Stereotypes are often created about people of specific cultures or races. Stereotyping is a big problem, and everyone can be affected by it. There are many ways to stereotype a person such as, all white Americans are obese, lazy, and dumb, men who spend too much time on the computer or read are geeks, that all Mexicans are lazy and came into America illegally, all Arabs and Muslims are terrorists, or that all Americans are generally considered to be friendly, generous, and tolerant. All of these examples of stereotyping are found in the novel, Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream by Joshua Davis, published on December 2, 2014. This is a nonfiction/documentary book that follows the true story of how four undocumented teens from Mexico, leaving in Arizona, are joined by two teachers who were able to beat some of the best engineering schools
Robert Heilbroner, in his essay “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments,” justifies why the ideas stereotyped aren’t always correct. He goes on saying that stereotypes are “a kind of gossip” which makes us fit more into the life we think we need to live. He states examples of how names, nationalities an...
Everyday we experience stereotyping in one way or another. Over the years stereotyping has become such a large part of our society that it is a vital part of our everyday communication. It has caused many of us to not really think about who a person really is, or what they are about, but to accept instead a certain stereotype that has already been created by our society and given to an individual. Stephanie Ericsson makes an excellent point in her essay when she says “they take a single tree, and make it into a landscape.” The statement she was trying to make by saying this is that many times, a stereotype is made by an individual because of something done by one particular person in a certain group, but is then given to the whole group as a result. Our society has given a stereotype to practically every form of human being out there. Some examples of this are the blond that is said to be dumb, the kid with glasse...
Stephen Bonnycastle in his criticism, In Search of Authority, explains stereotypes as, "The system (sometimes known as “the patriarchal order”) that causes the majority of men and women to take on these different roles ... hidden, like the rules of grammar in a language."(10). When a stereotype is introduced into a situation for a extended period of time, it is psychologically proven that it will become an expectation. Stereotypes prove to act as an obscuring lens into which most people view the world. When a person is unaware of a culture, race, gender they mainly use the stereotypes to judge them against. Stereotypes are not just a generalization of a group of people, "stereotypes warrant a closer analysis, because they powerfully shape the reality of gender differences..."(Brody 396). The effects of stereotypes go deeper than just male and female, race against race, "everyone is vulnerable to stereotype threat, at least in some circumstances"(reducingstereotypethreat.org). Stereotypes overall cause negative side effects, some fatal. These side effects are psychological as well as physical. People who
Stereotyping is a normal part of every one’s life. Humans, by nature, classify things. We name animals and classify them by common characteristics but stereotyping can have negative repercussions, and everyone does it. In a recent study it was proven that everyone has an unconscious need to stereotype (Paul). In Junteenth and The Invisible man, Ralph Ellison argues that stereotyping can cause mayhem by making the people become something they are not.
Stereotyping is an adaptive mechanism, adopted by human beings, to assist in the cognitive process of impression formation. Within the social arena, we are subjected to unfamiliar people and places on a regular basis. First impressions are often formed hastily on the basis of very limited information, and assisted by the practice of stereotyping. More specifically, stereotypes can be defined as the cognitive schemas that relate to a particular social group. These cognitive schemas are mental structures that contain knowledge about a particular type of stimulus: attributes, relations, and so on (book). In terms of gendered stereotypes, these schematic structures outline how men and women ought to behave, and contribute to impression formation:
Stereotypes can be defined as sweeping generalizations about members of a certain race, religion, gender, nationality, or other group. They are made everyday in almost every society. We develop stereotypes when we are unable or unwilling to obtain all the information we would need to make fair judgments about people or situations. By stereotyping, we assume that a person or group has certain characteristics. Quite often, we develop these ideas about people who are members of groups with which we have not had firsthand contact. Stereotyping usually leads to unfair results, such as discrimination, racial profiling, and unnecessary violence, all behaviors which need to be stopped.
According to the dictionary, stereotyping is an idea that is used to describe a particular type of person or thing, or vice versa, a person or thing thought to represent such an idea. It is natural to stereotype and everyone tends to do it to some degree, whether they want to admit it or not. There are lots of different stereotypes that people usually form. Most often people will stereotype based on physical appearance, or actions that they observe
“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept responsibility for changing them.” -Denis Waitley. This quote can be interpreted to mean that if you accept things as they always were, then stereotypes will never change. However, if you want to change societies generalizations then you need to change your actions. The theme of the novel The Outsiders is do not let stereotypes define who you will become and how you act.
Everyone has heard the saying don’t judge a book by a cover. Sadly every minute of the day someone gets judged because of assumptions that are not correct. These assumptions overtime eventually lead to stereotypes. A stereotype is an image or idea of a particular type of person. Stereotyping a person is seen in many differents aspects such as race, groups, beliefs, appearance, etc. An individual may ask why people are stereotyped or stereotype. In reality stereotyping helps people categorize the different type of people. It narrows down the options of who one might want to associate with. Stereotyping can have its negatives, it makes people ignore how others really are. It may lead to a person not wanting to hang out with another person because of the stereotype that persons group has. Everyday the general public use cars for the means of transportation. But what about when people use their car for more than transportation, car enthusiasts often modify their cars to their likings. Enthusiasts often join car clubs to share their common interests with other car enthusiasts. Often the people in car clubs have a stereotype of being juvenile, racing a lot, low-life bums, and ghetto when actually most do not have those characteristics.
Stereotypes are used everyday, by most humans, no matter how much effort we put into speaking objectively. Throughout the centuries, stereotypes have been made for almost every race or group of individuals. Examples of such include all blonds are unintelligent, all men don’t think before they act, women are not strong, and so on. In the book my RC class read, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, many stereotypes were made about greasers that the narrator, Ponyboy, completely went against. Greasers are a group of people who lived in The North side of town, and they were believed to be uneducated, violent, and emotionless. However this protagonist absolutely shattered these imposed molds that society has crafted for anyone who is part of this group.
The first characteristic of stereotyping is over-generalisation. A number of studies conducted found that different combinations of traits were associated with groups of different ethnic and national origin (Katz and Braly, 1933). However, stereotyping does not imply that all members of a group are judged in these ways, just that a typical member of a group can be categorised in such judgements, that they possess the characteristics of the group. Still, when we talk of a group, we do so by imagining a member of that group.
The term “stereotype” originally referred to a stamp used in the printing industry to make multiple copies from one single block. The first one to adopt this notion, to describe the way society categorized people, was social psychologist Walter Lippmann in 1922, in his book on media democracy, Public Opinion. He described the term as “the picture (of the world) that a person has in his/her head”. He was convinced that a picture it is definite, and reduces the world to simple characteristics which are represented as permanent by nature (Lippmann, 1997 [1922], p. 233).
Stereotypes are used every day, by most humans, no matter how much effort we put into speaking objectively. Throughout the centuries, stereotypes have been made for almost every race or group of individuals. Examples of such include all blonds are unintelligent, all men don’t think before they act, women are not strong, and so on. In the book my RC class read, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, many stereotypes were made about greasers that the narrator, Ponyboy, completely went against. Specifically, greasers are a group of people who lived in The North side of town, and they were believed to be uneducated, violent, and emotionless. However this protagonist absolutely shattered these imposed molds that society has crafted for anyone who is part
According to Baron, Byrne & Suls in their book Attitudes: Evaluating the social world. (1989) they defined the term Social Psychology as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations”. (p. 6). There are many concepts of social perception, two of these that will be looked at in this essay are Implicit Personality Theory and stereotypes. Implicit personality theory describes the beliefs, biases and assumptions, that an individual uses when he or she forms impressions on a stranger based on limited information. The way we form impressions and the different conclusions we make about other people based upon our individual impressions is also part of this theory. One of the first people to investigate how people form impressions was Solomon Asch in the 1940’s in his experiment ‘Forming Impressions of Personality' he was interested in how people form impressions and if certain traits affected peoples impressions. A good example of Implicit personality theory is if someone who is considered unpredictable they may be considered dangerous. The second Concept of Social Psychology that will be considered is stereotypes. Cardwell (1996) described stereotypes as “...A fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people.” may have beliefs and thoughts on different social groups and individual people and how they should act, and believe that all people in that group conform and have the same characteristics as the rest. By using stereotypes, it helps us simplify how we think of the social world as having a stereotype reduces our thinking process when we meet new people. An example of stereotyping is saying that all French people wear berets and have garlic a...