Author Archive
Our Mother’s Pretty Gardens
Should we read for political or aesthetic reasons?…
Aesthetic or political? Political or aesthetic? I feel this argument is threaded into a lot of issues and topics I find myself discussing in classes at college. This is not a surprise considering Southwestern is a liberal arts university. It is a continuous game of tug-of-war; aesthetic-political–POLITICAL–AESTHETIC. When I think of great, capital letter, Literature, political and aesthetic work together. Either the work begins as aesthetic, and ends up making a political stand, or the political work is so eloquent it ends up being aesthetic (speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. come to mind here).
“In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” is no exception. This work is very clearly Political, but it has great aesthetic appeal. The format of this essay is extremely interesting to me. Every author thinks of the way their work will be read, and as a result of all of the poetry we have been reading, I find looking at the “big picture” of this work is revealing. It seems that the essay was a build up and explanation to the poem at the end of the work. This build helped me understand the poem. I really appreciate the build because without it, the poem’s intention would have been lost on me. The poem itself could be read as racially ambiguous. Lines such as, “My mama’s generation/ Husky of voice- Stout of/ Step” could be describing any strict mother, but the format of this work, the essay before the poem, applies a definite race to the poem. This format adds the political to the aesthetic quality of the poem.
It seems important to the author that her work is known as black. She so vehemently describes the hardships of her race and gender, depicting a “genius of a great-grandmother” who “died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer’s lash” that this is blatantly obvious (233). So again, the political is vital to this author to be connected to the aesthetic.
“This is just to say”
I have to say I laughed when I read this poem. I think Williams is brilliant for writing this poem. When you read it, you’re immediately assaulted with the classic questions: “Is this art? What is art? Who says?” I think because this work incites these questions it should be considered a very important poem. And it’s the simplicity and grace that Williams does this with just makes me giggle and wish I had those skills.
[H]onor or [h]onor
The war rhetoric Higginson uses in his letter suggests he is unimpressed by the soldier. On page nine, he warns his amateur writers, “Be not misled by the excitements of the moment into overrating the charms of military life.” He goes on in this paragraph to say, “But the fact is patent, that there is scarcely any art whose rudiments are so easy to acquire as the military.”Higginson here says that a military profession basically takes no strength of mind at all. Why, at a time of war, would Higginson paint such a picture of soldiers? To me, this is reminiscent of the way Americans treated the soldiers returning home from Vietnam. They weren’t seen as heroes, like after WWII, but as villains. Obviously Higginson is not suggesting this, but he certainly does not want anyone to glamorize the war or its participants.
There is no suggestion of honor or valor given by Higginson, and I think Dickinson see that. In her letter to him she uses the word “honor” twice. In such a short poem this sticks out, especially when she capitalizes one and not the other. This reminded me of our class discussion of “Literature” and “literature.” She does not capitalize the first “honor” she uses. This is interesting because this particular concept of honor is one that Dickinson would have earned from Higginson. I see this as Dickinson being almost snarky towards him; he can only give lower cased “honor.”
The second time she uses “honor” it is of a more abstract idea. She says, “Since Honor is it’s own pawn–” this honor is obviously different from the one associated with Higginson. This could be seen as Dickinson making a stand against Higginson for the restored honor of the soldiers. It reads to me as if she’s saying, “Who are you to deal out verdicts of honor and talent?”
What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt You
As I read Passing, I started to wonder how the lives of these women, particularly Irene, would be had they never known of their ancestry. If Irene had never been raised around the black side of her family, and was simply taught that she was the color she was born, would she have ever known the difference?
This idea of knowing and not knowing shows up consistently throughout the novel. One example of this shows up on page 222 when Irene is grappling with the new knowledge of her husband’s affair at the party. She says, “It hurt, it hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew. If everything could go on as before.” But, as the novel continues it is obvious that keeping her knowledge a secret is severely painful. What people don’t know is hurting Irene- just like her “passing.” Irene’s inner turmoil and feelings of hypocrisy show how much something outwardly unknown, but inwardly known can hurt.
I think this idea was best shown when Irene gets upset with Brian for discussing racism with their boys on page 232. Irene doesn’t want the boys to know what racism is. She desperately wants to shield them from this inward knowledge, so they can live in blissful ignorance. But Brian will not have it. He wants the boys to be prepared, to accept the reality of who they are and what life will have in store for them. He knows they can’t simply put the subject away and pretend it doesn’t exist.
I think Brian is right to want to inform the boys of the realities of the world around them. Irene is a coward. She hides in her ability to “pass,” she refuses to talk to her husband about his desire to move or his affair. She would rather sneak around problems, “pass” by them. Yes, what people don’t know hurts Irene very much.
Literary Analysis and Methods 