Complete sample essay for Essay 2 assignment

Essay #2 – the Dominant Culture

Poe, Twain, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Hemingway, – these are names that are likely to appear on the reading list for any American literature survey course.  They are all white men, authors of what we call “the classics,” all recognizable by only their last names. 

Bharati Mukherjee, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Toni Cade Bambara, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sui Sin Far – these authors are not likely to appear in an average survey course.  They are not of European background.  They aren’t often recognizable by only one name.  Their works are far more likely to appear on the reading lists of special topics courses that focus on minorities, immigrants, or other groups outside the American dominant culture. 

But the dominant culture can’t be checked like a hat at the classroom door.  Whether it’s remarked upon or not, characterizations of the dominant culture are present in most (perhaps all) literature by American minorities and American immigrants. 

Bread Givers protagonist Sara is surrounded by the dominant culture when she goes to college.  Yezierska’s text spends multiple pages on Sara’s fascination with the “plain beautifulness” of her classmates.  Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” deals first with the machinations of the American legal system that separate mother and child.  At the end of the story, the dominant culture is embodied in a single character, the white woman whose skirts the Little One hides behind.  Other texts may characterize the dominant culture more subtly.   The dominant culture is used as reference point in these texts to define either what the characters want to become or what they want to avoid becoming, what they hope to assimilate into or what they intend to resist.

Students and educators alike might be more comfortable ignoring the imbedded commentary on the dominant culture.  Courses such as Immigrant Literature offer up a supposed respite from the usual round of white male authorship – the basis of so many other courses.  Naturally, the class members might prefer to focus on things they can’t in other courses or might resent the dominant culture wriggling its way into the study of minorities or immigrants. 

Students who belong more or less to the dominant culture have another reason to avoid the topic.  Americans love underdogs.  One of the pleasures of a course such as Immigrant Lit is in reading about either fictional characters or essayists who struggled and succeeded, and getting drawn into the tale and rooting for them to succeed.  If we step back far enough to analyze the dominant culture, then these students get jarred back into a reality where, often, they belong to a group that has been cast as the villain of the piece.  This adds to myriad other difficulties in identifying the dominant culture the individual impulses of everyone in the room to explain just exactly how they aren’t part of that culture.

Nevertheless, the arguments for examining the dominant culture in these texts are ultimately more compelling than the reasons for wishing to avoid it.  Actively addressing what the dominant culture is and how it appears in writing by immigrant and minority authors restores balance or adds depth of meaning to some of the more negative portrayals.  For example, “In the Land of the Free” and “American Horse” are two stories that portray American society as an automated, unfeeling system that disrupts families.  When these texts are read with Of Plymouth Plantation, the characterization becomes three dimensional.  The Pilgrims, the very prototypes of American dominant culture, valued family and community highly, but were pulled apart by their own prosperity.  Today we talk a lot about American emphasis on the individual and the nuclear family, but this is not how the culture started out. . . .

Immigrant literature builds up piece by piece, detail by detail a broader vision of the dominant culture.  This includes insights into how the dominant culture thinks about family, as discussed above, as well as education, intermarriage, and mobility. . . .

This points out yet another difficulty inherent in analyzing American dominant culture.  Eva Hoffman’s relates in Lost in Translation the words of a friend who told her, “Being American means that you feel like you’re the norm.”  The dominant culture is allegedly something blank, colorless, unremarkable.  Whatever the dominant culture is, all of its sharp edges have been melted away making it harder to identify.  One student (Lori) pointed out in a final exam from 2003, “As Americans maintain the white, Protestant, plain style, there is an assimilation of the children of the dominant culture to that of the immigrant cultures, leading to a creation of a dominant culture not as white, religious, or plain as the American culture predecessors.”  As Immigrant cultures and minority cultures become more appealing to young dominant culture Americans, it’s possible that the task of identifying and scrutinizing the dominant culture becomes even more complicated. [AS]