9H - SR Kien essay

Catherine Kien

Mr. Abel

English 1 Honors Block 2

3 October 2015

Summer Reading Essay

Often in life, one must thoughtfully make a decision between two opposing forces. When confronted with different choices, people normally feel conflicted. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.” In other words, people face challenges that cannot easily be overcome, and the conflicted person is torn between the competing emotions within her heart. Erik Erikson, a psychologist, portrays the conflicts of growing older and the virtues and negative outcomes of a stage’s crisis with his eight stages of Psycho-Social Development. These eight stages, which explain the virtue, outcome, and crisis for each age group, can be used as reasoning for characters’ life choices and their outlook on life. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and James McBride’s The Color of Water, characters struggle with a dilemma. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout Finch discovers the difficulty of being herself and not feeling incompetent at the same time as she attends school and deals with society’s expectations for her. In The Color of Water, Ruth McBride runs away to New York from her suppressive Jewish family and leads an opposite life out of rebellion and a successful self-discovery. To illustrate the idea of being faced with two different choices, Lee and McBride employ the literary devices internal conflict and setting, respectively.

Using internal conflict, Lee conveys the initiative versus guilt crisis of Erikson’s psychosocial development through Scout, a young girl who is seeking the approval of others. In this third stage, Scout faces the two possible outcomes of dealing with initiative and guilt: purpose and inadequacy. Scout also desires for her society to need and accept her, so she acts a certain way in order to gain their approval. Scout, for example, dresses and behaves as a tomboy, wearing overalls and playing outdoors instead of wearing dresses and staying at home. She acts like this in order to have her brother accept her. Jem tells Scout, “[She] was being a girl, that girls always imagined things, that’s why other people hated them so, and if [she] started behaving like one [she] could just go off and find some to play with.” (Lee 45) In other words, Jem, when arguing with Scout after Atticus said not to play hurtful games regarding the Radleys, is saying that Scout’s act of “being a girl” means she is delusional and has little value. Therefore, acting like one ultimately results in rejection from others; Scout, as a result, stops urging Dill and Jem to act reasonably when they would foolishly torment Boo Radley, because she wants to have purpose in her society and fears she would be useless to others if she were a girl. (Lee 58) Lee, using Scout’s tomboyish habits, is illustrating the sacrifices one must make in order to feel accepted and needed by others and the emptiness one would feel if she were rejected for an unchangeable quality. In addition to this, Lee is developing Scout’s internal conflict by developing her fear of being discarded and perceived as unworthy. Another example where Scout would eventually feel either useless or significant in her society is when she first goes to school. Atticus, Scout’s father, teaches her how to read before Miss Caroline. Scout, despite the upper hand one would have for acquiring this skill, receives scolding and humiliation from her teacher instead of praise and recognition: Miss Caroline, after she learns that Scout already knows how to read, “looked at [Scout] with more than faint distaste.” (Lee 19) After beings scolded by her teacher, Scout “mumbled that [she] was sorry and retired mediating upon [her] crime.” This suggests that Scout, after being reprimanded, feels incompetent and guilty for being more knowledgable than her classmates, for she refers to her harmless act of knowing how to read as a “crime.” Lee, through Scout’s guilty reaction to Miss Caroline’s wrongful admonishment, conveys how vulnerable children are to feelings of hurt and unimportance. Because of this, Scout’s internal conflict is feeling either purposeful or useless when facing a crisis of initiative versus guilt.

McBride, using setting, demonstrates Erikson’s fifth stage of psychosocial development through Ruth McBride, a rebellious, deprived teenager who faces identity crisis. In this stage, one is faced with the crisis of identity versus role confusion, and the outcomes of this crisis are either fidelity or rebellion. Simply stated, the fifth stage through which Ruth goes deals with finding oneself and learning one’s purpose of living, which results in either being faithful in a relationship or rebelling against society. An example of Ruth dealing with this crisis is when she falls in love with a black man, a forbidden action in her setting, for she was white and racial tension in southern states was intense and deadly. Ruth says, “Tateh [her father] didn't like…black men in particular. So it stands to reason that the first thing I fell in love with in life was a black man.” (McBride 107) She rebels against her father and his morals by loving a black man, and this is because, according to Erikson’s fifth stage of psychosocial development, she was treated with infidelity and was deprived of fulfilling her desires. She longed for “love, nice clothes, a date. [She] never had that. [Her] life was the store.” (McBride 107) Because Ruth’s life was missing the practical things a regular girl her age would have, such as abundant love, an active social life, and even material things, she rebelled against her father and had an unfathomable relationship with an African-American man. McBride includes this to imply that, when love is not present in one’s life, she is subject to go against society’s beliefs since something essential is missing within her heart. Furthermore, Ruth rebels against her family again when her graduation day is approaching: she desires to graduate in her town’s church with the rest of her classmates and her best friend, despite her being Jewish, but her parents declare she cannot; her father tells her, “Respect your mother and me. Don't break the law of the bible. Don't go into that gentile church,” but she rebelled against him due to her unloving setting and “put on her cap and gown and walked the six blocks to Suffolk High School.” (McBride 157) Ruth committed this act of defiance because her parents did not support her decision of graduating or any of her past decisions altogether, which hinders her ability to discover herself with fidelity. At the church, Ruth cannot bring herself to walk in, and she “stepped out of line,” a sign of role confusion since she is conflicted with either following her parents’ ways of living or doing what she personally desires in life. (McBride 158) Ruth finally “[catches] a Greyhound bus for New York the very next day” as a response to her family’s scarce love and care for her, so she escapes the potentially tragic life she was to live if she had stayed. (McBride 158) Through this experience, McBride illustrates that when dealing with identity versus role confusion crisis, love is a vital element in finding oneself, and if one had not been familiar with love at a young age, she is bound to rebel against her society.

When going through the stages of life, people are faced with crises that lead them to negative or positive outcomes, which depends on how one deals with the crisis. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had stated, “Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast, and each will wrestle for the mastery there.” One, in simpler terms, will inevitably come across a dilemma that leads her to two opposing, competing outcomes. Eric Erikson’s eight stages of Psycho-Social Development portray characters’ conflicts throughout their lifetimes. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, through the use of internal conflict and Eric Erikson’s third stage of Psycho-Social Development, convey Scout’s dilemma of being who she truly is and feeling inadequate and guilty of her actions. James McBride’s The Color of Water, using setting and Erikson’s fifth stage of Psycho-Social Development, demonstrates Ruth McBride’s identity crisis and habit of rebelling against her indifferent, unloving family. The eight stages of life, through which all people go, are necessary in gaining virtues and human experience.