...“Who am I?” a question that many teenagers might have had asked themselves before. Searching for its own identity is an unavoidable process that teenagers would have to face during the transition from childhood to adulthood. In the story “How I contemplated the…” and “Boys and Girls”, the two demonstrate the adolescence of two teenagers girls. In the stories, both girls had gone through some troubles in searching their identity, desire for attention, but they have completely different approach to it. First of all, both young girls in the stories had gone through some difficulties in defining themselves. In “How I contemplated the…” the central character does not feel the belongingness toward the society and the home she lives at. She thinks everything was ugly and she sees herself as a misfit in there. “All ugly. She eases over to the gloves counter, where everything is ugly too” (Joyce), she states while at the excellent store. She lives in a wonderful home with maids and her parents are very wealthy, but she’s not happy, she does not feel the love from her parents. Similarly, the main character in “Boys and Girls” was struggle in searching her identity between the definition of a girl and herself. Her gender, her mother, and the society had pressured her to become someone against her will. She didn’t want to stay inside the house doing housework like her mother for her entire life. “A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become” (Munro)...
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...She’s independent, strong-willed, and a survivor. What’s there not to admire about Katniss Everdeen, the narrator and main character of The Hunger Games? The only thing she really knows at the beginning of the book is how to provide for her family. Katniss, being a natural survivor, gets through the games easily. She can run, she can hunt, she can camouflage, and most importantly, she has the instinct that she needs to stay alive. But that’s really all she has going for her. Katniss is socially awkward, stubborn, and determined to a fault. She’s also self-centered and self-reliant. Her pessimistic self really shows when she is narrating. Katniss’s struggles with her father’s death has hardened her, making her a somewhat difficult character to actually connect with. Everybody likes a happy story with a kind and self-sacrificing main character, but Katniss is far from that. She doesn’t have much warmth and love to offer anyone, and she finds it hard to get attached to someone – only socializing with her family, Gale’s family, and occasionally Hob traders. Katniss is a self-trusting person. She will only rely on herself and is stubborn when it comes to asking for help. Well, I guess she’s got some good sides to her, too. Katniss is a tragic hero, saving her sister and taking her place in the Hunger Games. She’s noble to a degree, protecting Rue, who reminded Katniss so much of her own sister. She mercifully killed Cato, another tribute who’s been basically terrorizing her and...
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...Some things we learned about Taylor is that she came from a town where all the girls get pregnant before finishing school and without knowing what the world has in hands for them. As for Taylor she always paid attention in school because her mother always told her to have self respect for her and to finish her education before getting pregnant and ending up with no future. When Taylor is at school thinking how she got through high school without getting pregnant she remembered her mom saying “ barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew” (4). In this passage, a connotation of the word “ barefoot” is unable. The author also used the word “ pregnant” which brings to mind useless. Even though it is not stated these words help to suggest that in this scene taylor's mom was saying if she were to become a wife of a man who will just grow tobacco you will be at home taking care of all the kids and you not being able to have time for yourself. Her mother's words make her realize that that's not the life she wants for herself. It also makes her see that if she were to get pregnant and not finish school her life won't be a decent way of living . Taylor wants to make a change she wants to be different from the other girls...
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...the name’s too long. I’d never bother myself. I’d call her Mary if I was you.” This is a scene where we see Maya’s core identity, her name, being wiped out and tempered with. Throughout ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’, we realize the protagonist, Maya, faces several identity crisis in her life and is thus left to write a biography of the culmination of incidents that have occurred throughout her life and hence that have shaped her identity today. Those around her mold Maya’s identity. Her relationships are what define her. There are no two ways about it; Maya’s rape calls her identity into question. Suddenly, she is portrayed as both a woman and child but she feels like neither. Thus, she is left with spending the rest of the book trying on different identities...
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...Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” “The Little Mermaid” is a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen about a young mermaid (girl) who longs to be part of another world; the result of having fallen in love with a prince and learning how to attain an immortal soul. Fairy tales like those by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault tend to be quite simple, in the sense that they focus on general messages and lessons surrounding common initiations, or stages of life, that we all go through as human beings. “The Little Mermaid” is far more complex than any of the Grimms’ or Perrault’s tales. Andersen Provides the reader with a more individualized, realistic experience of life and its hardships, something not typically found in other tales. Through his highly refined detail and imagery, the symbol of a voiceless woman, and the little mermaid’s decision to sacrifice her happiness for the sake of the prince’s, Andersen shows us what it means to struggle in order to understand one’s identity. Andersen utilizes extensive detail to describe everything from gross manifestations of scenery to the subtleties of the young mermaid’s thoughts. By providing such detail Andersen allows the reader to see through the eyes of the little mermaid as she moves along on her quest. When we are introduced to the princess, whom the prince marries, she is described as having “delicate and glowing” skin and “long dark lashes” surrounding “a pair of deep blue loyal eyes” (100). This description...
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...Women are motivated by money and success in Top Girls. This is evident when (2)However, Success for women in The Handmaid Tales is not defined by money but by surviving while keeping their values intact. The Handmaidens “learned to whisper without sound” and “learned to lip read” so that they could “exchange names”. By using the verb “learned” Atwood shows these women capable to acquire knowledge to adapt to situations while doing this together the women exchange pieces of their identity with one another establishing a stronger relationship. (3)In the past women hadn’t had the same freedom they once did. For example the character, Lady Nijo in Act One stated how she “belonged” the Emperor a position she was “brought” up from a “baby”. The word belonged suggests how she is a possession, an object, a thing without feelings to her a woman capable of making her own decisions. It implies it is the purpose of women to serve men; it’s what they’re bred for. The recurring b’s her conveys that she felt angry but there was very little she could do about it.(4) By contrast the women in the future dystopian novel once had freedom before and lost when Gilead came into power. Offred compares the value of the board game Scrabble when it was “once the game of old women”, “Now of course”; the value is “Now it’s different” it “is freedom”. Atwood uses the repetitive “Now” to emphasize how the sight Scrabble is intoxicating Offred and how she longs for freedom. It also demonstrates how the short...
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...A BLACK WOMAN’S JOURNEY: FOR COLORED GIRLS Created in 1975, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf, focuses on the struggles of black women not only from that era, but issues still pertaining to black women 35 years later. Shange’s powerful choreopoem is comprised of seven women trying to "sing a black girl's song…. Sing a song of life, she's been dead so long"(Shange 18), creating a voice for every woman. None of these women possess a name, only a color, to show that they represent all women of color. Shange includes themes of love, abandonment, sexuality, abortion, and domestic violence to emphasize what women in her community were and still are subjugated to. Through dance, poetry, and music these women slowly but surely find their true identity. Ntozake uses her work as a tool to empower all “colored girls” by creating these seven strong women that form a bond when they are able to find their identity as black women, and essentially in their journey make it to the end of their rainbows without committing suicide. When looking into Shange’s life there’s no question that situations, which she had observed day-to-day or experienced herself, were imposed on her writings. Born as Paulette Williams she was raised in a middle class family, which was not a childhood common for blacks. Her family moved to St. Louis and she attended a non-segregated school where she had to endure blatant racism at the mere age of eight years old. She rebelled...
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...novel, Almost a Woman, there are a lot of distinct differences and problems the author talks about. Distinct differences and problems in that the author, as an immigrant, faces many difficulties and cultural changes from when she migrated to New York City from Puerto Rico. As we go into the book, there are some key aspects of identity that are played in Esmeralda’s family and herself. One aspect of identity is the socioeconomic status of her and her family in the big, well known dynamic city of New York. This aspect of identity is a big concern throughout the book and in real life because it’s what most immigrants have to deal with from their movement from their native country to a foreign country. Socioeconomics is the social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. In general it analyzes how societies progress, stagnate, or regress because of their local or regional economy, or the global economy. This is a monumental matter for Esmeralda as she is a middle school student going onto high school and as everyone knows, high school can be four years of highlight or four years of straight torture and since she’s an immigrant with no knowledge of American culture, this is a big concern for Esmeralda. Esmeralda, coming to America at a young age, is flustered with emotions and doesn’t have anyone to talk to because she is limited with who she has. She has her siblings, but she can’t relate to them because they’re too young, and she has...
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...it’s often worth the struggle to stand up to fears. In Junot Diaz’s short story collection, Drown, the main character Yunior and his family from the Dominican Republic, often come face to face with their fears in the United States, but can’t take their stand. In “Negocios,” Yunior’s father immigrates to America and struggles to earn enough money to bring his family over, and ends up cheating on Yunior’s mother. Yunior later connects with this woman. In “Fiesta, 1980,” Yunior faces his harsh cheating father while deliberating...
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...rabbit hole as an innocent 7-year-old girl who discovers her identity crisis and who leaves Wonderland as a mature young adult with nothing more but the memories of the “dream of Wonderland” (Carroll 110). We can see Alice’s struggle to identify herself as her body size keeps changing just like a kid who is going through puberty, she does not know what to expect next. These experiences provide Alice with a different perspective on Wonderland and lead her to a maturing process from the crying, stubborn Alice in the beginning to the self-powered Alice who stood up for herself in the final trial. The transition has been represented in some of the different adaptations the book has had. Although Alice’s size changes in Carroll's text Alice in Wonderland illustrate her maturation, in both Disney's (1951) and Jan Svankmajer's adaptations, size changes do not emphasize maturation; they have a different purpose. Alice grew and shrunk throughout various scenes in both adaptations, but at the end of both movies she remained the same childish Alice that once stumbled upon a rabbit hole. Both adaptations emphasize Alice’s childishness in order to attract a larger audience, but at the same time a younger audience that can relate with what Alice is going through. Figure 1: (Leavens) In the first chapter of Carroll’s book, Alice finds herself alone in a dark hall, where we see a very child-like scene as she cries from her struggles and frustrations “…when she got to the door, she found that...
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...Andrea Hernandez Professor Natalie Hewitt Intro to Literature 25 March 2011 Independent Identities A Doll’s House, a play by Henrik Ibsen, and The Darling, a short story by Anton Chekhov, are about two women struggling to find their own independent identities separate from that of their husbands. A Doll’s House is about a husband, Torvald, and his wife, Nora, coming to grips with the fact that their marriage is not exactly what society hypes it up to be, while The Darling is about a woman, Olenka, whom struggles to find her own identity through the midst of her ongoing relationships with her numerous husbands. Both women overcome their own personal obstacles in their own ways, while one ultimately succeeds in at least wanting to find out who and what her own personal identity is, and the other failing, still succumbing to living her life with the need of a strong, male figure. In the first act of A Doll’s House, the reader can see that Torvald and Nora’s relationship is anything but perfect. Nora, a woman who’s never had to work a day in her life, relies solely on her husband to meet her and her family’s financial needs. As the title of the play portrays, Nora lives the life of a doll by constantly living in Torvald’s shadow, being his perfect trophy wife, and doing whatever she is told; she relies solely on her husband for happiness and support throughout every little thing she does. In the beginning of Act One, Nora has just come home from buying Christmas things when...
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...Simon Adelle UCOR 102 Paper 3 Professor Marcum Making It in A Man’s World April 29, 2013 “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros exposes the life of the main character, Esperanza, for one year as she struggles with trying to find her place in America as a Chicana young girl while also coming of age. The novel starts the day Esperanza and her family of six move into a house on Mango Street, and immediately she expresses her antipathy for not only the house, but also for the area in which they move into and the people around who judge them because of their ethnicity. The story is not told in the traditional format of a continuous story divided into chapters, but rather Cisneros uses forty-four vignettes to allow for the reader to fully understand why Esperanza has the struggles that she has. Along with Cisneros’ illustrating Esperanza’s looking for her identity through images of Esperanza’s thoughts and female obedience, symbolism of violence, legs, the Statue for Liberty, and Nenny, and diction of Spanish words, not using quotation marks, and a maturing tone, she also uses these them to permeate Esperanza’s desperation to leave Mango Street throughout the whole novel. Cisneros’ use of vignettes highlights important moments in Esperanza’s life that emphasize how she develops over the course of a year. Cisneros uses the brevity of the vignettes to enhance the imagery to give the most vivid image through her limited amount of words for...
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...everyday several boys and girls struggle with the fear of being humiliated, embarrassed, and rejected. Just because they feel as though society won’t like them the way they already are. It can be extremely difficult for new students to transition into a new school and be the new kid on the block deciding if they should just be themselves to fit in, or pretend to be this completely different person that their new peers find suitable. In 2004, Mark Weters directed this hilarious comedy film Mean Girls, which perpetuated exactly how difficult and challenging it can be to maintain a sense of your identity and personality in a whole new “Girlworld” at school. Throughout the film it’s clear that the most important theme and lesson is to be yourself. In the film, the main character Cady finds herself struggling to either just be herself and stay friends with the “not so cool kids”, or...
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...used differently around the world. General languages use voice and lip movement to communicate, signers use their hands and facial expressions, along with body language in order to convey accurate meaning. Members of the Deaf community take pride in their identity and...
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...Everyone has an identity whether it is a place of upbringing, ethnicity, religion or family. We all have our own unique image that one sends out to the world. When immigrants come to the land of promise, prospect, and new beginnings they all have one thing in mind, to identify themselves with the American culture. Although the struggle to make it was not easy for immigrants they still found a way to survive. A huge factor that plays in finding ones identity is culture. In America, we have a set of ideals and attitudes that we call American. Individuals come here to work, grow businesses, and to appreciate the freedom they did not have in their countries. Our identity is not really about food, religious views, or cultural traditions. The US...
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