Rachel Risinger

March 1, 2010

Web reviews

Jennifer Rieck: Sample Student Research Project Fall 2007

I was drawn to Ms. Rieck’s discussion of the parallels of the character Ruth in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Ruth in the Bible mainly because of her use of the scene where Macon and Milkman commandeer the family kitchen, exhile Ruth from the room, and discuss the treasure Macon believes is waiting for him in Virginia. Bringing this scene to the front of her discussion about the parallels of Ruth in the Song of Solomon and Ruth in the Bible illustrates sensitivity to the concept of what happens at the exact moment that a human being simply gives up hoping to affect change. At this point in their marriage there just really is no point in Ruth making an effort to be part of any decision, and while the character Ruth does not do so earlier in the book for the benefit of the readers, at least Morrison lets the reader in on the crumbling of the family dynamic at some point.

The disrespect that her husband has shown Ruth throughout their marriage has rubbed off on Milkman and he is incapable of regarding his mother as a thinking, reasoning human being. Macon is angry with his wife because she grew up and does not consider Ruth possible of being anything other than a one dimensional care giver. For Milkman, his mother was easily interchangeable with his sisters, and ultimately with Hagar. Ruth has absolutely nothing to gain from standing up to or arguing with either her husband or her son.

Further, Ms. Rieck point sout that Ruth’s lack of a mother to steer familial development in her early years has essentially stunted Ruth’s growth and development. The lack of female family in Ruth’s developmental years resulted in a complete inability to develop an identity for herself based on her own terms, even if society did not recognize the necessity of a woman owning her own identity at that time as being essential to her development. On this point I would wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Rieck.

Fernando Trevino: Reconciliation of the Past: Song of Solomon and Bless Me Ultima

Fernando Trevino attempts in his Reconciliation of the Past: Song of Solomon and Bless Me Ultima to explain what he terms the “paranoia” that exists among the principle characters of Song of Solomon a the residual effects of slavery. Mr. Trevino states “the traumatic events of slavery has left the main characters paranoid and trying to find comforting qualities of their past and bring them to the present.” I would completely disagree with Mr. Trevino on his assertion in regards to Macon Dead. While Milkman’s mother Ruth is concerned with hanging onto the past, feeling a connection to the past in her preservation of certain social rituals and affectations, her husband Macon has been bruised and humiliated by the past and reacts to his hurt by lashing out at those who might dare to remember his past differently than he does. His resistance to engaging in sexual intercourse with his wife after the conception of Milkman is clearly indicative of an ego that has been assaulted and is now unwilling to be hurt again. It is irrelevant that Ruth’s father, the man against whom Ruth compared Macon is dead. Macon will punish Ruth for the rest of their days together simply because she participated, no matter how peripherally, in his humiliation.

The impact of being hurt by one’s intimates is potentially as psychologically traumatic as the institution of slavery could have been, and I would assert that the family dynamic that so completely rendered the Foster-Dead family so emotionally crippled was not only the after-effects of slavery so much as it had to deal with the tension that develops when the class system that exists in every population is exposed. The first Macon Dead  was seemingly on the way to being the emergent generation that could bring the Dead family into the land-holding class until he was murdered for his land. Macon Dead the second would have been a sought after suitor for the young Ruth Foster had his father been a member of the landed gentry. As he was, landless and shopping for a wife and a way to earn a living, he was forced to endure the privation which comes from raising one’s class instead of enjoying the position that comes with birthright. And unfortunately for Macon’s family, they are is the most convenient target for his frustration and outrage.

Kurt Bouillion

I enjoyed Kurt Bouillion’s descriptive analysis of the inherent contradiction in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, yet the entirety of the black race had to struggle for another century to be able to acknowledge any social status that came even remotely close to equal with that of white America.

But I feel that his transition into a discussion of the dream metaphor that is present in Frederick Douglass’s memoir and the later work of Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs is disjointed and without much merit. All discussions of Dr. King’s speech deal with the “currency” of the dream of freedom, Douglass and Brent/Jacobs are seemingly more concerned with the physical and spiritual freedom that is promised in their dreams. To equate the “promissory note” of Dr. King’s speech with the desire for freedom expressed by Douglass and Brent/Jacobs seems to tarnish all three at once. I think Mr. Bouillion is falling into the convenient trap that exists in discussing “The Dream” with “The American Dream”, a trap which I admit I have fallen into many times before.  The consistent ideal associated with “The American Dream” is that it is based on some measure of economic success in order to be even partially realized. “The Dream” of Douglass and Brent/Jacobs and of the Civil Rights Movement was not so much based on any measure of economic success but rather the desire for enfranchisement in the economic system on a level field of play so that the promise of economic success through one’s own efforts was at least possible. The right to dream as each would for his own benefit coincides with the right to work for one’s own benefit.

Research Plan

Soul Sisters: The Double Minority Status of Women in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

For my research work in the American Minority Literature class, I will write a traditional research paper, examining the double minority statuses of the women who inhabit Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.  I will also draw some references to Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”, which I feel has distinct points that relate to the relationship between Macon Dead and his daughter, First Corinthians. Repressing the natural sexual development of his daughters is a way to ensure that they will not achieve a deviant status uch as the one occupied by his sister Pilate.

I would like to focus my research on the social and economic restrictions that force Ruth, First Corinthians, Magdalena, Hagar, Reba, and Pilate to inhabit the particular places they do in Macon and Milkman Dead’s lives. I hope to prove that Macon Dead enforces economic dependence on his wife and daughters and that he is indifferent to the social stratification imposed on his sister and her family because doing so allows him to ignore them socially. His contemporaries do not expect him to improve his sister’s lot in life.  She occupies a deviant position in society, and society is content to let her continue to do so.

Included in my research will be

Angelou, Maya. “Still I Rise”

Brent, Linda. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Classis Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

               New York; Penguin Group, 1987

Fussel, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Class System

Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: the Penguin Group, 1977.

Essay

Responsibility is a hallmark of the aristocracy.

I heard Edie Bouvier Beal say those words while watching the documentary Gray Gardens a few years ago, and it has popped back into my fevered brain now and then when I was confronted with issues that raised the question of class in America. While reading for American Minority Literature and reviewing Objective Two, Part B in particular, it occurs to me that those who seek a “high class” designation in America, now and in the past, fail miserably at attaining that which they most desire. Because, I would assert, that the American idea of class is too easily confused with the concept of celebrity.

Our current culture in America relies too heavily on media saturation to relieve the masses of the responsibility of making an effort to gather fact and form own informed opinion. This is in direct reaction, I feel, to the breaking down of racial, gender, and ethnic differences in our society that allowed social stratification to exist within isolated populations and among groups in general.

America today is assailed with countless hours of programming on television, radio, and the internet that are devoted to mindless drivel about sports figures, actors, heiresses whose only claim to fame is the name they were born with, and those people who desire to achieve some sort of status simply by being associated with “someone famous”. As a society, Americans in particular seem to be obsessed with the idea that access to limitless financial resources means an individual is credited as having a high class or social prominence. The desirability of anonymity simply does not exist anymore. Doris Duke may have been considered something of a celebrity in her heyday; however there is simply no comparison between her class status and Paris Hilton’s notoriety. What eventually endures is the scope of the impact one’s resources had in bettering the lives of others rather than how entertaining one was considered by one’s audience before looks began to fade, money was spent faster than it was replaced or simply someone more interesting comes along.

In contrast to America today, is the post-slavery America of Toni Morrison’ Song of Solomon. I like how this book takes place in a family one generation after slavery in the Northern part of the country and concerns a family that is not dependent on agriculture for its survival and prosperity, or as is frequently remembered from undergraduate history, downfall into the sharecropping system. My only other experience with any post-slavery literature was Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.  It was ingrained in me from my public school education that forty acres and a mule was the pay off for a life of forced slavery and that was good enough. It wasn’t until I got to college that it dawned on me that those who were entitled to the forty acres and a mule got the land and livestock that some white man didn’t want.

Certainly Frederick Douglass’s mistress, Mrs. Auld in Baltimore felt some responsibility when he first arrived in her home and she began to teach him to read. Clearly through his description of Mrs. Auld at the beginning of his time in her home through the end of his service in the Auld household, she began to assign a clear stratification between herself and the slave class. A woman who “started her marriage as someone without the experience of owning a slave and earning her own living to a woman who withheld the grace of literacy from Douglass not merely because she was instructed to do so by her husband but because in keeping from him a path to enlightenment she somehow felt better about her position. Although the wisdom in the Auld household was that teaching a slave to read would “do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.” Mr. Auld’s seeming concern for the “happiness” of his slave is both touching and revolting. It evidences a clear understanding and desire to maintain class difference among the races.

The memoir of Harriet Jacobs, writing under the name of Linda Brent Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, gives the most compelling evidence for a discussion of Objective 1, Part A, Involuntary (or forced) Participation and Part B Voiceless and Choiceless.  Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery, however due to the economic circumstances of her father’s skills as a carpenter and the value his master places on being able to hire him out to others, Harriet enjoys a relatively longer childhood than other children born into slavery. Until she is six years old, she does not realize that she is a piece of property.

Her story illustrates the aftermath of forced participation. Her grandmother told of her capture a a young child and being sold to a couple who kept a hotel and recognized her “value” as a worker who was intelligent and faithful, and took care of her, not as one human being towards another, but as a property holder cares for a chattel to preserve its value. It is through the commerce indulged in by slaveholders that Harriet’s family is broken up and she eventually lands in the “care” of Dr. Flint who protects her as an asset that has been bequeathed to his five year old daughter. This development, combined with Harriet’s physical development into a young woman put her in the category of Objective One, Part B, Voiceless and Choiceless.”

Although Harriet has no legal standing whatsoever to rebuff the sexualized advances of Dr. Flint, she does exercise a choice when she decides to make herself completely undesirable to him and becomes pregnant by Mr. Sands. Not once, but twice. She exercises the choice to give her virginity to someone other than her master, whose attendant anger at the situation leads the reader to believe that if had never crossed his mind that this young female slave would have possessed the complex thought process necessary to construct such a plot to escape his plans for her. It does not occur to Dr. Flint that Harriet would make the choice to give up her own self-respect in order to avoid being sexually exploited. However, she did make the choice to give up her good name among her family and fellow slaves.

I would personally argue that anyone who puts another human being into the position of having to make such a debasing choice can never hope to attain any social status worth mentioning.  The attempts of certain isolated populations, such as slave holders, to attain status regardless of the actions required to do so only display their lack of class, breeding and self-discipline.