Reader Reviews |
My personal recommendations are listed first; the writings that spoke to me the most, as a white woman struggling to be an anti-racist in the South. Minnie Bruce Pratt essay: "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" Yours in Struggle; Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism - Firebraud, 1988 Mab Segrest essay: "Southern Women Writing: Toward a Literature of Wholeness" My Mama's Dead Squirrel, 1985 Lillian Smith book: Killers of the Dream - W.W. Norton & Co., 1949, 1994 |
This page contains reviews of some of the authors mentioned to give you a flavor of the writings. Submit your own by emailing me or use the message board by clicking on the button on the left. |
Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples is an intricately related collection of short stories about the residents of a fictitious small town in Mississippi named Morgana. It is a book about how life in a clannish, small town can be pleasurable but limited under the microscope of its fellow citizens. What are most interesting about the interlocking stories are how the town's residents interrelate and observe one another and how a certain type of complacency can result from such a simple and stagnated lifestyle. With the exception of Virgie Rainey and Loch Morrison, most of the residents have adjusted to a safe and sheltered existence within its confines. Welty gives us an idea of how we are to view the characters in the preface of the book where she lists the main families as individuals within families and families within communities. The exception is Miss Eckhart, the music teacher, who challenges the normalcy of everyday living in Morgana and is a mystery to some because of her single life. We get a glimpse of Miss Eckhart's character in "June Recital" when we read of her failed relationships and her unhappy life. We get a different view of the community in "Moon Lake" where we get to know Loch and Cassie Morrison. While children, both are full of spirit and appear to want more out of life than the small town can offer. Loch eventually decides to leave Morgana and seek a new life in New York while his sister Cassie never ventures outside of Morgana. She becomes content to teach piano and dwell on her mother's suicide, thus giving up on her own spirit for living and thus settling to merely exist. The character most like the writer is Virgie Rainey. In the final story "The Wanderers," Virgie shows her own individual ability to control her own life by breaking all ties to family and the community after her mother's death, thus discovering her own self-consciousness. With her mother's death, Virgie is able to release some of the anger and resentment that has built up in her and emerge from her isolated life with knowledge and strength to pursue a new existence. In the end, Virgie is sitting alone in the town square with an old beggar and feeling in total control, thus distancing herself from the sheltered life she always knew. The Golden Apples shows the reader that protection and fear can sometimes cause more harm than good when it begins to stunt individual growth. Gail Stein |
I was very impressed with the writings of Flannery O'Connor. I felt that her writing portrayed a true realistic view of the South as it struggled through the growing pains of desegregation and assimilating to a new society. It is my opinion that Flannery O'Connor presents the most honest view of Southern life. I was most impressed with the collection of stories Everything That Rises Must Converge. All of the stories within this collection dealt with women attempting, usually unsuccessfully, to come to terms with the changing society. These stories realistically chronicle women who still believe in the image of the Southern woman as the "Southern Belle" despite what life has brought them. Julian's mother in the title story, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" reminds me of this the most. Julian's mother is somewhat like I would imagine Scarlett O'Hara to be after the end of the Civil War. She is a constant in the battle for the Old Southern ideal. She believes that a person remains what they are despite any changes in society. She states at one point, "You remain what you are. Your great-grandfather had a plantation and two hundred slaves." Among her traits is an unyielding racism. She refuses to ride the bus by herself merely because it had been integrated. She even at one point insists that the South was better off when there was slavery! She finds desegregation ridiculous. "It's simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence." This absolute hatred for integration is a very realistic view of white Southern society at the time. Julian's mother was also very manipulative throughout the story. She constantly played on Julian's emotions to get what she wants from him. In the beginning, she talked to Julian about returning her hat because she should have used the money for something else. She continually harps on the subject until Julian finally declares that she should keep it. Again, this reminded me of Scarlett O'Hara. She was also manipulative in her conversations with other people. "His mother immediately began a general conversation meant to attract anyone who felt like talking." Eventually, this conversation would be brought to the subject she wanted to speak of, her hatred of integration. Again, Julian's mother becomes a representative of the old Southern society Julian, although male, represents the changing tide in the society. He often tried to wake his mother up to the changing world around her. Julian attempts to waken his mother be stating, "Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are." Throughout the story, Julian seems disrespectful towards his mother. He claims to feel completely detached from her. He is often embarrassed by her outdated beliefs and unintelligent remarks. He claims "she lived according to the laws of her own fantasy world, outside of which he had never seen her set foot." It is ironic that he makes this realization from inside his own fantasy world, or "mental bubble" as he called it. Also, for all his detachment he was emotionally shocked when his mother dropped onto the street and died. It was quite funny actually because he kept imagining all these ways he could torture her with black people. In essence, in her death he had gotten what he wanted. The black lady who wore the hat matching Julian's mother would prove to be the catalyst for both Julian's lesson and his mother's death. I may be morbid, but I thought it funny when the black woman punched Julian's mother for giving her son a penny. The shock of being hit paralleled to a world where the shock of changing times hit the Old South mentality. The death of Julian's mother not only symbolized her actual death, but the death of the Old Southern Belle ideal. Flannery O'Connor in essence killed this ideal just as it should be done. For this fact, I cannot find her death awful, but resourceful. Amanda Fortenberry |
Ida Wells-Barnett was an icon before her time. She was a black female who had partial ownership of a paper where she spoke out in regards to racism, sexism, and the tortuious, unfair deaths of the African-American people. She rebuked the notion of the stereotypical immorality of sexual desires towards the Caucausian race. In "Lynch Law in America" she describes the "unwritten law" where by a man is brutally murdered after his accusers are judge, jury, and executioners. The shame to all people should be that this was a common pratice in which our free, democratic political system turned its head and closed its eyes. In reading this my stomach began to turn in regard to our "superior nation's" so called democracy where by all people were free and equal. After the political world supressed the black vote the unjust deaths still continued. Our lawmakers often knowningly delivered the victim to the executioners. The barbarinism was compounded as people would travel from near and far; a party was proclaimed by these sadistic murders. If fear, humiliation, and death weren't enough for the victim they attempted to make him confess to his accuser's lies, but often to no avail. Our country has persecuted many immigrants over our history and as hypocrisy goes still proclaims to be the land of equality and freedom. When government was questioned by their home countries where was the legislation to protect these immigrants seeking a life of freedom and prosperity? The United States hid behind state doctrines. As a citizen of Italian descent I must wonder how many of my relatives were unjustly accused, and why were all the citizens so resolved to this immoral behavior. Until our leaders and citizens can eleminate racism, sexism, and the unequal enforcement of laws for different people we should all feel sorrow in our hearts. Embarrassingly enough many of the issues are still present in our culture today. Until we can unify against injustice, it will continue. Ida Wells-Barnett was a woman all women should follow. Kathleen Milliken-Napolitano |
I was caught this week by the Grace King story, "The Little Convent Girl," and upon rereading the introduction, one critic aptly described the main character as "a grotesque parody of the [southern] feminine ideal." (p 169). I was having the same thoughts about convent inhabitantws during the Roberts story, "The Sacrifice of the Maidens" in which the main character has an erotic fantasy involving one of the postulants taking her vows with his sister. When he learns her name... "a dim sense of consummation and satisfaction played over him." I believe the attention to minute descriptive detail of these chaste, pure, opinionless women was meant as a form of destruction of this ideal after the Civil War, a literary protest to change the way women are perceived in the reconstructive world they were struggling to inhabit. However, these progressive women writers still manage to hold on to some of the prevailing ideals in post-slavery times, they are unable to escape the complete comfort of the protected circle of the white women's world by promoting feminist issues at the expense of racial ones. The Grace King story lays the issue right at your feet by the apparent suicide of the young girl upon the shock of learning and living with her estranged mother who is, as she learns at the last possible moment, "Colored!" (p . 175). Although I enjoyed the description of the mate on the boat cleaning up his language when she was present (p. 173), most of the portrayals of the black characters (the fact that the mother had to have had an exact copy of the convent letter to be believed {p. 175}, the roustabouts "good for nothing lives" {p 176}) and the suicide itself speaks to the internalized racial superiority that was present during that time and lives on today although not usually as blatant. These beliefs about the relationship between the races in that time also appears in Katherine McDowell's "Gran' mammy" in ways that seem so insulting, but probably natural to the author and her peers. When she states that gran'mammy loved their mother more than her own children (p.147), and ..."it was in gran'mammy's arms that she died; and neither husband nor children mourned more tenderly for the beautiful life cut short." (p 148) - is she speaking from the memories of children who think they are the center of the universe anyway? Or does she still believe as an adult that the person she grew up loving as her own grandmother would have chosen their family over her own? Rachel Nicolosi |
Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is I believe one of the best books to have come out of the Harlem Renassaince because of it's uniqueness in content. Unlike most of the books of that period, it is the story of a black women who's greatest enemy in life is often herself or the men she invites into her life and not a white person. It is not a protest novel but rather a celebration of black southern, rural and feminine life, which was very taboo to write about at the time. Because it did not crticize that lifestyle Their Eyes... was often wrongly criticized itself, by contemporaries of Hurston's own black community. Which is ironic in itself because Zora like Janie was told to shut up when she went to tell her story. But Zora like Janie had something to say that although wasn't considered proper, was needed to be said and simultaneously wanted to be heard. That what I find really facintating about Their Eyes... that in it art appears to literally imitate life. In my first reading of Their Eyes... I was a really young woman, like 13 or 14 and at that time I was completely awestruck by the story and it's herione. Janie became by the end of the story a woman I would have like to become and she had taken a lot of backroads to do it, something that seemed rather exciting at that age. Now reading the story as a young adult I have become struck by far more things, Janie struggle to find her voice, the simultaneous value and judgement placed on her by her community, the limitations for a black woman at that time, and Janie's battle with herself to find happiness, alone. Those are all issues women are struggling with today, making Their Eyes a dated, yet timeless book. I was also was struck this time around by the importance the setting of the south plays in the book. Janie's entire life takes place in the south and is very much colored by it, from her grandmother that was born in slavery and therefore saw material wealth as the key to happiness to her shack with Tea Cake out in the swamps that she found happiness in and had to flee because of a hurricane. The south made her the woman that she was, a very light skin black woman that had probably more white blood than black, but was still nonetheless considered black. She was what every black man seemed to want, yet she wanted very few men. She was the wife of the leader of an all black community and should have found support and freedom there but instead she found limitations and unencouragement in her role as the perfect southern woman, that is until she stripped herself of that role. She ran with her lover to the Everglades and the swamps and enjoyed her life there so close to the land that would eventually run her back off, but in the swamps she learned how to become the perfect imperfect southern woman. Their Eyes... is a excellent example of southern women's literature and a southern woman author. It is a story not often told: a southern black woman's quest for her voice and happiness in the world, largely devoid of political overtones. For that I believe this book she be cherised as unique piece of American literature altogether. Roserita Walsh |
