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Is Esther Greenwood Homophobic?

Much like the rest of Plath’s comedic genius within The Belljar , Esther’s brief train of thought about homosexuality is incredibly hilarious. I cannot get the line “I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug” out of my head— no one will tell the poor girl anything about what lesbians actually do.  Esther’s first real introduction to gay behavior is when she forgets to leave after knocking on DeeDee’s door to no reply (218). She’s here to retrieve some sheet music, when she happens upon DeeDee and Joan vaguely lying on the bed together instead. We know it’s Joan because Esther describes “pale, pebble eyes regard[ing] me from the gloom,” and Esther had just finished ranting about how “horsey” Joan looked a page earlier: “I thought how sad it was Joan looked so horsey, with such big teeth and eyes like gray, goggly pebbles” (216). (Holden Horse Hypothesis, anyone? You know it’s Joan when the eyes are horsey goggly pebbles and you know it’s Doreen when they’re indest...
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I think Holden Caulfield is/was being treated for tuberculous meningitis

  When Holden is addressing us in the “present tense” context of The Catcher in the Rye , it’s clear to the readers that his current environment is purposefully vague. However, the brief amount of description of his surroundings suggests to a fairly likely theory that he is being held in some sort of mental health facility. At the beginning of the book, Holden says that he’s going to “just tell you about this madman stuff… just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy” (3).  It’s very clear to us by the end of the book that Holden is not only having a mental health crisis, but also a physical one. This would align well with the fact that the time period of The Catcher likely doesn’t have very good resources for mental health conditions, and provide a societal motivation for why the people around him would choose to have him go to some sort of psychiatric ward— if not for his rampant depression, than for the potential tuberculosis he might have ca...
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Death =/= Determining Destiny

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          The first point in the Black Panther Party’s 10-point Program is the belief that  “Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny,” described by the title “We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.”  The first poem we read representing the Black Arts movement was “For Black Poets Who Think of Suicide” by Etheridge Knight. Knight urges black poets not to commit suicide, as he designates suicide as a white activity--- an act of surrender which is made possible by having privilege. In contrast, “...Black Poets belong to Black People,” not death. In a philosophical sense, I do not believe there is any decision that gives one more agency, than the decision to decide to live. While killing oneself is a decision a person can make, no one can “determine their destiny” if they do not continue living. There is no way to have agency over one’s life if they are no longer living. ...
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The Literary Gilt of The Gilded Six-Bits

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  While no attempt to define a pattern in nature, human or otherwise, has ever been fully successful at escaping the inherent nuance and exceptions in the natural world (call that the persistence of nature in naturalism), Zora Neale Hurston certainly abides by her list of uniquely Black traits in art, in her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression”. There are many works written during the Harlem Renaissance that contrast with Hurston’s claims that, for example, that Black literature is always “absent of the concept of privacy”, when we have read several poems describing the pain of hiding one’s suffering due to their Black identity.  However, the entirety of The Gilded Six-Bits and the writing that paints the story are highly decorated in the exact styles that Hurston had highlighted; namely Adornment or “the Will to Adorn”, “Drama”, the “Absence of the Concept of Privacy”; upon further examination, you can find much more hidden throughout. In fact, I was hard pressed to f...
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Rude Rejections vs Rose-tinted Reminiscence: Ramifications of the Reconstruction Period

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                 In class, we approached two different sets of readings approaching the Reconstruction era. In turn, the settings and attitudes of the characters featured in the readings initially approach the “opportunity” of Reconstruction differently.  In Chestnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth”, we see a very clear pattern in Mr. Ryder’s (and the Blue Veins Society’s) ideology; a sect of racism which modern readers currently name as colorism. This discrimination causes Mr. Ryder and other mixed Black people to internally reject their Black identity and heritage in favor of trying desperately to gain white validation. Of course, in “The Wife of His Youth” these characters are fictional, but the story intends on being a realistic portrayal or parallel to real life circumstances. In this sense, recovery from slavery is no more than a rejection of the past; of the previous collective Black identity as chattel .  The Blue Veins Socie...
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