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In our AP Lit class, students are instructed to not only fulfill the given requirements of the course, but to also pursue an extended study beyond the coursework they are given in class. We call this extended study our "Stretch Goal."
For my Stretch Goal, I am planning on pursuing a year-long study of inequality in literature - whether it be race, gender, or social status. My study will consist of independent reading of various works that deal with these issues, while in conjunction, studying how the life of the authors who wrote these books shaped their writing.
In Term 1, I began my exploration with the Nobel Peace Prize author who very recently passed, Toni Morrison, who deals very heavily with issues of race. I read and analyzed one of her many famous works, The Bluest Eye.
For Term 2, I delved deeper into racial inequality with Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. This work is the most frequently referenced title on the AP Lit Reading list*, and although it is a long read, it is definitely worth the time: The way Ellison's work deals with race and bigotry and its effect on the minds of the parties involved is perhaps one of the major reasons why it is thought to have "changed the shape of American literature."
Term 1: The Bluest Eye
Term 1: The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
The Life of a Prolific Writer
The Life of a Prolific Writer
Childhood: Morrison grew up during the Great Depression in the 1930s - a time of severe economic hardship, and a time in which racial segregation was still very much a reality. Morrison's father's family had before moved from the South to the North to escape sharecropping and harsh racism. Storytelling was also an important part of Morrison's childhood.
Writing Career: During her time studying at Howard University, Morrison began writing her very first book, The Bluest Eye, which questioned the concept of true beauty by looking at the life of a young African American girl who wishes she could have blue eyes. Later in her career, Morrison wrote Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Jazz. One must not forget what is thought of as Morrison's masterpiece, the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Beloved. All of Morrison's works use beautiful and poetic phrasing to articulate human struggle, and how her characters aim to understand the world around them. Morrison touches her readers as she addresses universal human ideas with an African American background.
Best Known for: Being the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
"Toni Morrison is an important novelist who continues to develop her talent. Part of her appeal, of course, lies in her extraordinary ability to create beautiful language and striking characters. However, Morrison's most important gift, the one which gives her a major author's universality, is the insight with which she writes of problems all humans face.... At the core of all her novels is a penetrating view of the unyielding, heartbreaking dilemmas which torment people of all races."
"Toni Morrison is an important novelist who continues to develop her talent. Part of her appeal, of course, lies in her extraordinary ability to create beautiful language and striking characters. However, Morrison's most important gift, the one which gives her a major author's universality, is the insight with which she writes of problems all humans face.... At the core of all her novels is a penetrating view of the unyielding, heartbreaking dilemmas which torment people of all races."
Elizabeth B. House (Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook).
Context of The Work
Context of The Work
Attitudes Around The Bluest Eye
Attitudes Around The Bluest Eye
During the time that Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye, the popular opinion was that in order to be beautiful, one had to be white. The ideal image of white beauty was portrayed across movie screens, magazines, and within society, as the white family was portrayed to be the most successful and perfect version of an American family and white celebrities were placed in the spotlight. Thus, people of color at the time were forced to ask themselves: Is it better to keep their own culture, or to conform to the culture of the dominant race - and aspire to be like a white person? This internal struggle within many African Americans created varying forms of internalized racism, as they began to think that the only way to be beautiful and successful was to aspire to be white.
With The Bluest Eye, Morrison placed this issue from the most innocent black perspective: from a young African American girl failing to see her own beauty, believing that they only way for her to be truly beautiful is to have blue eyes. Using this perspective crystallized the issue of social inequality amongst different races. Morrison's work is also credited towards contributing to the Black is Beautiful movement in the 1960s, as it opened people's eyes to the issue from the black perspective.
Term 1: Reading Goals
Term 1: Reading Goals
For Term 1, I am aiming to complete The Bluest Eye by reading and analyzing approximately 40-50 pages per week. For each part of the book (which is divided into seasons), I will provide continual updates of my progress, including important or interesting prose I come across while reading, my thoughts about the book, and my interpretations of the work.
Prologue
Prologue
Though short, the prologue of Bluest Eye brought forth some important overarching ideas that encompass the entire story. The prologue opens with a series of sentences that seem to come from a children's picture book. Following this, a narrator explains what seems like looking in retrospect on the story as a whole - almost giving away the book before it starts. Both of these elements combined were somewhat disturbing to me - the children's story seemed off-putting, and the narrator in the second part of the prologue seemed like they had a degree of guilt and tragicness in their tone. It seems that Morrison is setting up how her readers should be feeling about the story before it starts - she is purposefully trying to make her readers feel uncomfortable.
Notable Quote
Notable Quote
- "See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? ..." (Morrison 3).
- "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow" (Morrison 5).
Interpretation/Response
Interpretation/Response
- The novel immediately begins with a series of short sentences that seem like they were taken directly from a children's picture book. This may suggest that the novel to come will be told from a child's perspective, building together the story of a family (which it is). However, placed in just plain text, the way this "children's story" reads feels choppy and abrupt - it immediately makes the reader feel uncomfortable and like something is off. The narrative itself is also rather disturbing: no one ever wants to play with Jane - not her mother, not her father, not her dog. Again, the reader is brought to a feeling of eeriness and questionability when they read this. Then, the story is repeated again, but this time without punctuation, and then a third time without punctuation and spaces. This makes the text even more disjointed and disturbing, which is suggestive about what will happen to the lives of the characters in this novel - Pecola specifically. These characters are faced with a series of disjointed and sudden events that don't make sense or don't seem fair, emphasizing the difficulty of their lives.
- It seems ironic here how no marigolds grew in the fall. Typically in literature, the season of fall is associated with harvesting and reaping the rewards of what one has grown. Morrison is trying to point out here how something is off - this story does not follow the typical cycles of the seasons. Pecola, the character this novel is centered around, has been raped by her own father - an unthinkable act. No wonder the marigolds don't grow in the fall - Morrison is doing this to emphasize the tragedy of this depraved act.
Autumn
Autumn
In the first season of Bluest Eye, Morrison establishes the story through the eyes of a young girl, named Claudia, who observes the life of Pecola Breedlove, whois helped by Claudia's family. This is not the only perspective that Morrison uses, however - she also utilizes a third person omniscient point of view to completely depict everything surrounding Pecola's life. It is interesting how Morrison chose to tell this story - instead of making it from the perspective of Pecola herself, Morrison instead depicts the life of Pecola from everyone else's perspective.
During this chapter, Morrison first introduces Pecola and her family on a distant surface level, and then looks further and further into Pecola's life by delving deeper into the things surrounding her - for instance, Morrison dedicates a part of this chapter describing the furniture in Pecola's house, and then takes a step deeper into Pecola's life by showing the individual lives of people from Pecola's family.
It should also be noted that this chapter is full of paradoxes and ironies: Pecola sees beauty in almost everything but herself. The only thing in which Pecola's parents find stability is by inflicting pain on one another. Prostitutes are shown to be looking down on people with a "tarnished character," not realizing what they themselves look like. Morrison purposefully includes these ironies to increase the sense of disjointedness and instability in Pecola's life.
Notable Quote
Notable Quote
- "Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs -- all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured. 'Here,' they said, 'this is beautiful, and if you are on this day worthy you may have it.'" (20-21).
- "There is nothing more to say about the furnishings. They were anything but describable, having been conceived, manufactured, shipped, and sold in various states of thoughtlessness, greed, and indifference. The furniture had aged without ever having become familiar" (35).
- "The only living thing in the Breedloves' house was the coal stove...The fire seemed to live, go down, or die according to its own schemata. In the morning, however, it always saw fit to die" (37).
- "You looked at [the Breedloves] and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction" (39).
Interpretation/Response
Interpretation/Response
- This quote encapsulates the overall idea of the work - it makes the reader question, "what is true beauty?" It cannot be all that is encapsulated in a white china doll; and yet, society is teaching young girls that this is what beauty is from a young age. One can see how by telling a young black girl that only white is beautiful, they can develop internalized racism within themselves.
- This quote is describing the furniture in the Breedloves' house. The desolate and depressing nature with which their furniture is being described may also suggest the nature of the family themselves - Pecola does not live in a stable, warm environment. This places emphasis on the tragedy of Pecola's situation.
- It is significant here how the only "living" thing in the Breedloves' house still manages to die before the next morning. This may be symbolic of the fact that, at the very core, Pecola's family is broken. Any chance of them being a happy family, any spark of a possibility that Pecola would be able to have a better childhood, always dies, just like the coal stove.
- It is so dismaying, and rather pathetic, that Pecola's family simply accepts that they are ugly - they think it is just who they are. This is one of the many instances in Morrison's work that shows the effects of the toxicity of society's "ideal" form of beauty - it causes entire families, and young girls, to simply accept that they are ugly, losing faith in themselves.
Winter
Winter
Winter: a season that, in literary terms, signifies death. In this season, Morrison exhibits winter in continually showing the harsh reality in which Pecola and the people around her live. Morrison delves deeper into the internalized racism of the characters surrounding Pecola.
Notable Quote
Notable Quote
- "The disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal...The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me...Brightly colored knee socks with white borders, a brown velvet coat trimmed in white rabbit fur...There was a hint of spring in her sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk" (62).
- "It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds..." (65).
- "We were sinking under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last words. If she was cute—and if anything could be believed, she was—then we were not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser" (74).
Interpretation/Response
Interpretation/Response
- Maureen seems to be representing a "higher class" of African Americans who strive to be like white people. One can even see from her "bright colors" and "white rabbit fur" exhibit cleanliness and seeming perfectness, which is what Morrison associates whiteness with in her novel. It is also significant how Maureen is depicted to be a "disrupter of seasons" and how she appears to be every season except for winter - Morrison may be doing this to convey people's awe at Maureen and her lifestyle. Mareen is a light-skinned, wealthy black girl who enchants her entire school.
- This quote underlines another example of an African American's hatred for their own race. The young boys on the playground are taunting Pecola for being black as a way of angrily expressing their own self-hatred and internalized racism.
- This quote emphasizes how appearance - specifically, white appearance - is associated with status. Colleen and Freida are realizing the harsh reality - that no matter their personality, society still sees them as "lower" because they do not meet society's expectations of beauty. Morrison is criticizing society's ideals of beauty with this quote.
Spring
Spring
Containing perhaps one of the most tragic moments in the entire story, the events that occur during this season completely defy what is expected to be associated with Spring. While Spring is supposed to be associated with innocence and rebirth, the very opposite happens - Pecola is raped by her father, the farthest from innocence that one can imagine. Throughout the entire work, Morrison has created a cycle of unnatural events leading up to this one and embedded it into a natural cycle - the flow of the seasons - to underline the depravity and tragicness of Pecola, caused by internalized racism.
Before this tragic event occurs, however, Morrison introduces the individual lives of Pecola's parents, Pauleen and Cholly, leading up to the rape. Both Pauleen and Cholly's lives seem to parallel one another: they start off with a somewhat normal and joyful life, However, their lives are sprinkled with insecurities - Pauleen had stepped on a dirty nail from a young age, making her foot warped for the rest of her life, and Cholly's mother had abandoned him when he was a baby. Then, both their lives appear to fall increasingly downhill once they meet each other - Cholly feels trapped in his marriage with Pauleen, whereas Pauleen gets increasingly lonely as her husband spends signficant amounts of time away from her.
Notable Quote
Notable Quote
- "In one gallop [Mrs. Breedlove] was on Pecola, and with the back of her hand knocked her to the floor...in a voice thin with anger, [she] abused Pecola directly and Frieda and me by implication" (109).
- "'Hush. Don't worry none,' she whispered, and the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake" (109).
- "There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another -- physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it and collected self-contempt by the heap...There flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches" (122).
Interpretation/Response
Interpretation/Response
- How un-mother like for Mrs. Breedlove to treat her own daughter in this way. This underlines the terrible environment in which Pecola is forced to live - she did not choose this life. She is only an innocent young girl who longs to be beautiful, who longs to be a part of a loving family, who longs for a companion.
- In comparison to how she treats Pecola, Mrs. Breedlove treats this little white girl like her actual daughter. The "honey in her words" starkly contrasts with her inflicting harsh violence on Pecola, her own daughter. This inconsistency in the way Mrs. Breedlove treats her own daughter places emphasis on the complete disorder and lack of fairness in Pecola's life. How could such an innocent young girl have so much misfortune, so much hatred inflicted upon her, even by her own mother?
- Like mother, like daughter - just as Pecola is obsessed with having blue eyes, wishing that she could be more beautiful, so too does Pauline wish for physical beauty. Morrison seems to describe this obsession as if it was a poison - it literally contaminates and infects the minds of those who wish to behold it. Morrison further emphasizes here how popular culture is the poison and root of young women's insecurities.
Summer
Summer
In the last 20 pages of the book, Pecola is depicted to have seemingly gone insane. Pecola has claimed to have finally had blue eyes, but she has gained them in a darkly ironic form - the only way for Pecola to have obtained them is if she has lost her mind. How tragic it is that, instead of giving her the beauty and companionship that she always wanted, Pecola is instead given blindness to reality with her blue eyes. Even worse - she has essentially become invisible to others. Claudia and Frieda see Pecola roaming the streets, flailing her arms and looking for garbage to eat, but they do not acknowledge that she is there - not because they dislike her, but they are ashamed of their failure to help her.
Though a terribly tragic way to end the book, it seems fitting given the issue that Morrison aimed to address. Morrison used the story of a young, innocent black girl to depict the tragic effects that internalized racism can have on African Americans.
Notable Quote
Notable Quote
- "So it was. A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (204).
- "She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down... Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach - could not even see - but which filled the valleys of the mind" (204).
- "And now when I see her searching the garbage - for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late" (206).
Interpretation/Response
Interpretation/Response
- This quote encompasses the whole of Morrison's purpose: to convey the tragedies caused from internalized racism. The "horror" that Morrison is referring to is the dismal fact that Pecola, and little black girls in general, would rather change their appearance to seem more "white" than learn how to appreciate the way they look. When such a yearning is fulfilled, as shown in Pecola finally obtaining her "blue eyes," her deviation from being herself has been the cause of her sad fate.
- Pecola seems to be depicted as a bird here - in literature, flight and wings are usually associated with freedom. The way Morrison portrays Pecola, however, ironizes this idea of freedom. Pecola has a "futile effort to fly," and she is intent on a "blue void she cannot reach." Pecola will never be free from a life without blue eyes, and thus will never know what it is like to be truly beautiful. She has literally driven herself insane to the point of never realizing that she will never attain blue eyes. She will live the rest of her days, believing in a freedom that does not exist.
- Looking at the novel in retrospect, it can be speculated that the marigolds are a metaphor for Pecola herself, and the dirt represents the world that will not accept Pecola for who she is. Just as the "land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds," so too did everyone and everything surrounding Pecola tell her that she was not good enough, that she was not beautiful, that things will only get better for her if she has blue eyes. Furthermore, just as everyone now ignores Pecola, blaming her for being ugly, not showing any consideration of her own situation, so too do the planters of the marigolds "acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live."
Term 2: Invisible Man
Term 2: Invisible Man
Ralph Waldo Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison
The Life of a Prolific Writer
The Life of a Prolific Writer
Invisible Man was a product of its time and place, as it was written in context of African Americans demanding equality, but it also sprung from Ellison's personal experiences.
Being the grandson of slaves and living in poverty during his childhood, racism was a very real part of Ellison's life. Later in his life, when Ellison served in World War II, African Americans served in segregated units.
Prior to joining WWII, Ellison attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to study music. However, after spending a summer in New York to work and earn money for college expenses, he began to write when he met Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. They encouraged Ellison to become a writer, and he spent the next 7 years crafting Invisible Man.
"When I was a kid, I read... novels... and always, I was the hero. I identified with the hero. Literature is integrated. And I'm not just talking about color, race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize again and again the wholeness of human experience."
"When I was a kid, I read... novels... and always, I was the hero. I identified with the hero. Literature is integrated. And I'm not just talking about color, race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us recognize again and again the wholeness of human experience."
Ralph Waldo Ellison
Context of the Work
Context of the Work
Attitudes Around Invisible Man
Attitudes Around Invisible Man
Invisible Man was published at a time in the United States when racial attitudes were in flux. There was a growing sense that racial inequality and segregation - that had been the norm for centuries - was about to change.
Ellison wrote Invisible Man during the time of World War II. At this time, black and white Americans were still segregated under Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal" clause. During the war, one million African Americans served in segregated units, and many of these soldiers thought that this segregation conflicted with the U.S.'s espoused ideals of equality. In the war, these African Americans were fighting - at least partially - for racial equality, as they were fighting to end the Holocaust. However, they were returning to a county in which they were not afforded equal rights - treated almost like they weren't even human. This dissonance is what led many African Americans to demand equal rights as citizens of the country for which they risked their lives.
Shortly before Ellison began writing the book, the Pittsburgh Courier started its "Double V" Campaign, which called for "Victory at home, victory abroad." In other words, it emphasized that black citizens should support the war effort, and they also deserve to be supported in their own country. It tried to emphasize that equality was good for both the war effort and the country.
The Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision wouldn't happen until 2 years after the publication of Invisible Man, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act took another 12 years after that. By then, Invisible Man was a famous book, and an important voice in the Civil Rights Movement - and remains so today. The essential failure that made segregation possible was the failure by white people to understand African Americans as fully human. In their eyes, African Americans were invisible - hence, the reasoning behind Ellison's famous title.
When Ellison talks about the wholeness of human experience, that's one of the things he gives his unnamed narrator in Invisible Man. The narrator is a black man on a quest to find his true self while facing racism and disrespect from all sides - even, sometimes from other African Americans. Invisible Man explores the injustices of racial inequality from an African American perspective. Ellison's skillful articulation of this issue is one of the primary reasons why Invisible Man was, and still is, one of the most highly regarded works in the American literary canon.
Not only did Invisible Man deal with social issues of the past, but it remains prevalent in today's context. It addresses violence rooted in racism when at one point in the work, the narrator's friend is shot by the police. In 1952, and still today, African American men were disproportionately likely to be killed in interactions with the police. The difference between 1952 and the present day is that today, those shootings are much more visible. 64 years after the publication of Invisible Man, systemic racism remains a very real part of American life. That's part of why the book remains so relevant today: It reminds us that all people, everywhere, have the right not to be invisible, to develop their own identities, and to be respected.
"[Ellison] is not interested in literal, realistic truth, but in an emotional, atmospheric truth which he drives home with violence, writing about grotesquely violent situations. With gruesome power he has given 'Invisible Man' the frenzied tension of a nightmare."
"[Ellison] is not interested in literal, realistic truth, but in an emotional, atmospheric truth which he drives home with violence, writing about grotesquely violent situations. With gruesome power he has given 'Invisible Man' the frenzied tension of a nightmare."
Orville Prescott (in a 1952 review of the book)
Term 2: Reading Goals
Term 2: Reading Goals
For Term 2, I am aiming to complete Invisible Man by reading and analyzing approximately 60 pages per week.
I will take note of important prose on a Google Doc, which I have attached below. This document will be continually updated as I read.
Invisible Man: End-of-Term Reflection
Invisible Man: End-of-Term Reflection
As I have been reading Invisible Man, I am realizing that because of its length I am having trouble finishing it before the end of the term. Because this work is 3 times the length of Morrison's Bluest Eye, which I struggled to finish in Term 1 - and also due to the course ramping up in difficulty and work load with longer and more complex works - I have come to the realization that I may have been over-stretching myself in aiming to finish this book before the term ends.
Therefore, to ensure that I still analyze Invisible Man thoroughly without sacrificing quality, I will continue this stretch book into Term 3 - and perhaps combine my reading with Invisible Man with another shorter work later in the term. I believe it is important to look at Invisible Man in depth, especially given the fact that this work will be useful for the AP Lit Exam. Therefore, I think it would be more beneficial for me to further focus my time on Invisible Man for Term 3.
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