Final Blog

Throughout this semester’s class, I have read many books, all written by female authors. I did not know what to expect coming into this women’s literature class but I was ultimately pleasantly surprised. Each woman had her own story to tell and every experience was different and unique. But regardless of whether the stories told were similar, many shared themes and all of them held an interpretation of life.

I had never read many books or pieces of work that were written by women before taking this women’s literature class. It was not for any reason in particular that I have not read women’s works but now that I have read a full semester’s worth of material I definitely feel that there is a difference in women’s writing. They told stories of themselves and of other women, mainly of people who have gone through times of hardship. Examples of this would be The Shawl, where Ozick writes about how Rosa lost the one thing she loved, during the Holocaust. Ozick then goes further to show how the Holocaust affected her for the remaining years of Rosa’s life. Similarly we read When The Emperor Was Divine, which was about a Japanese family who were sent to an internment camp during World War II. These were two similar stories yet they both showed different aspects of history and of the lives that women live. The authors of these two novels are not characters in these books. They are historical fiction, in which the events were true but the characters were created for the story. The stories were real enough to pull me in while reading and real enough to feel sympathy towards the characters.

Then we had read other books by female authors such as Fun Home, which was different from the other books that were read. Fun Home was a graphic novel about a girl and her father. Most of the stories that involved a girl had problems and the story was based around the relationship with the mother but Fun Home showed the reader how important the daughter-father relationship was. This is why this book is important to keep, even if it is hard to read. All the other books entailed daughter-mother or woman-to-woman relationships but this book gave light to the father-daughter side of the story.

Throughout all the books, I saw a few themes that popped up in most the books and the most important them that I took from this class’s material was hope. I am not a woman, which makes this class maybe a little more difficult for me to comprehend but not impossible. As I read book after book, hope continued to surface in the pages trying to guide the characters through the dark. In When The Emperor Was Divine, the mother and her children are thrown from the perfect lives in rural America and forced to live in an internment camp for the duration of World War II without their father. This family needed hope; without it I don’t know if they would have survived. Not that they would have been killed but that their will to live could have been stripped. This nearly happened to the mother. The father on the other hand came back a completely different person because they had been capable of stripping him of his hope. I find this most notable in his final chapter of the book.

Hope pops up again in Push, Precious is lost in terrible cycle created by her mother and grandmother and without hope, I do not believe that she would have been able to overcome her hardships. She did not do it alone; she was helped by her teachers at school who showed serious interest and fortitude in aiding young Precious before she is living a life she regrets. The children in her class show her that she is not alone in her situation and that she can improve herself. Hope is a driving force that gave back a life, which had been taken from her by her parents, in which she can strive to be whatever she chooses.

This course has helped me, as a man, to better understand women. I think the book that aided me the most was The Vagina Monologues. It was tailored to women of all ages and its humorous kick gave me the ability to really enjoy the book. I can admit that women definitely have a lot more happening at a young age compared to boys, and I believe that I now have a firm grasp on that. But I am sure that will change once again once I start my own family. But this book has helped me to understand that every woman sees herself differently and that their self identity is very important and shapes their person.

new life

The book, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, by Dorothy Allison is somewhat unusual compared to other autobiographical books I have read. The use of pictures in combination with her own words significantly aids the reader in understanding her past and what she went through.

There is a passage on page 32 that is written with help from a picture on the following page and I find it very important in understanding Dorothy’s family. The passage is the following; “My family has a history of death and murder, grief and denial, rage and ugliness-the women in my family most of all. The women in my family were measured, manlike, sexless, bearers of babies, burdens, and contempt.” This passage, I find, describes the expected life of Dorothy and the women in her family. It is said to read and this emotion is pushed even further after seeing the picture of Ruth and her friend. They look depressed, exhausted, rugged and worn and most of all, hopeless. It reminds me of a picture I once saw of a few men from the Great Depression. But this passage is what has become of the women in her family and the beauty of this autobiography is that she does not follow in these footsteps, which have already been laid out for her by the people currently walking. Dorothy writes her own life and then lays out the life of her family, not only in writing but also in film. This is what makes me curious, I don’t exactly understand the reason for putting her family out there in the open. Was she trying to punish them for what she went through? Maybe, she is trying to show how not everyone lives the same life? I will never know for sure but I am fairly certain that she has moved on from the memories that haunted her, not that she has forgiven everyone, but that her life was good enough to write about.

Oppression

Ozick’s story about Rosa can be seen as either a story or triumph, or a story of oppression, but I think that it is obvious that this is a story that is weighted on the side of oppression.
Rosa’s entire life is based around the theme of oppression considering she was a victim and survivor of the Holocaust and has transformed her current life into a relived nightmare.
I can most definitely say that her early years of life were under oppression because she was stripped of her family in more ways than one. She was taken from her family n Warsaw and put on a train, which led her to an unknown destination. From there she was put in a death march that led then to the camp, which was described in The Shawl. After being forced to live like a caged animal by inhumane men, they murder the one last thing she had to call her own, Magda. This event seems to be the beginning of the end for Rosa.
She moves to New York and seems to be dealing with dealing with the Holocaust. She has opened an antique store and seems to be doing well for herself, for antiques do not come cheap. But due to the insensitivity of her customers, they throw her into a tornado of destruction and she smashes her entire store so that no one can have the antiques that she sold.
From here, she shelters herself and nearly becomes a recluse and lives a very dirty life in cheap motel that is paid for by Stella. This new life in Miami is representative of her experience in the concentration camp all those years ago. She hardly eats, leaves her room and is living in filth. It is Rosa oppressing herself rather than someone else oppressing her but nonetheless, Rosa is still living under oppression. And it will only be Rosa who can bring herself above the oppression she is living under.