Selfhood in American Literature - Assignment Example

Responses To Essay Questions On Selfhood In American Literature And An Analysis Of Selected Passages Of “The Grapes Of Wrath” Dictionary.com defines the word “selfhood” as: 1) the state of having a distinct identity or individuality; 2) the fully-developed self or an achieved personality; and 3) self-centeredness. Smith takes the idea of selfhood further by saying that “the way we as humans come to know ourselves, to experience our bodies and to place ourselves in relation to others changes – over time, and between cultures – can be to challenge something essential.” He further asserts that in the idea of selfhood, the person separates himself from the society, and the body becomes the container of his individuality. The skin becomes the boundary between the person and his world. Both literature and the media are full of these images of the self as separate from the society he moves in. It is not uncommon to find the theme of a story, whether in literature or in film, where man is facing an adversary outside of himself, if not larger than himself. It is understandable, as writers often draw upon their own experiences and insights to produce these stories. American literature, as surveyed in this class, is not any different from the rest. The three works to be cited in this essay are Walt Whitman’s preface to Leaves of Grass, William Faulker’s A Rose for Emily, and three chapters from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In the preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: Come, said my soul, Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one), That should I after return, Or, long, long hence, in other spheres, There to some group of mates the chants resuming, (Tallying Earth’s soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,) Ever with pleas’d smile I may keep on, Ever and ever yet the verses owning – as, first, I here and now Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name, Walt Whitman Though set in a form that is often filled with flowery imagery and other masking literary devices as poetry is, Mr. Whitman’s message in this preface is simple and clear. His soul, his inner being – his self – is committing himself to writing the verses that, as lines three to five infer, will give him a measure of immortality. For what perhaps does the self seek most of all but immortality, the assurance that the self will live on long after its confining body is gone? The idea of the self emerges differently in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. In this short story, the heroine, Emily Grierson, is depicted to be the last remaining member of a distinct and highly-respected family in their community. As Mr. Faulkner put it, “the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such” (582). Miss Emily’s father is said to be a domineering man. Miss Emily had a sweetheart, but just when everyone thought they were getting married, he left her suddenly. Thus, after the death of her father, she lived alone in the big house that crumbles slowly with time along with her own progressing age, seeing no one and accepting no one into the house, except for the time she spent giving lessons painting china to the young ladies of their community. Only a black male servant stayed in the house to attend to her needs. Miss Emily’s plight and fate portrays the need of the self to live outside the labels put up by society, and the need to be loved for its own merit. The Griersons are elevated from the rest of the people in the community. Mr. Faulkner writes that Miss Emily, as the last remaining Grierson, “had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (580). The men of the town went to her funeral “out of respectful affection for a fallen monument,” while the women came merely because they were curious to see the inside of the house. They do not see Miss Emily as a person; she is just a testament to the glories of the past. It can be inferred that Miss Emily spent most of her youth conforming to the dictates of her father and of society. A person of her status has certain standards to live by. She did not marry not out of lack of suitors, but because her father is picky. None of the young men who suited for her hand are good enough for her. Years after her father’s death, though, she did meet a man named Homer Barron, a Yankee transient who came to their town to supervise the paving of their sidewalks. For this man, Miss Emily threw her dignity and reputation to the winds in favor of love, taking him on as a lover and is seen driving all over town with him. At first the town was amused because they did not think that Emily would take this relationship with a day laborer, a man way out of her league, seriously. But later on, the ladies of the town began to feel scandalized, thinking that Emily is not setting a proper example for the young people of their town. So the Baptist minister came to visit her to talk about the situation, and when that failed, his wife wrote to Emily’s cousins so they could take care of her. The cousins came and Homer Barron left. He did return three days later to the house and was never seen again. Emily then retreated into herself and kept herself isolated from society in her large and lonely house. After Emily’s death, it was found that Emily poisoned her lover with arsenic and kept his body in the bedroom so that he would never leave her again and so she could pretend that someone loved her for herself enough to stay behind. John Steinbeck presents the relationship of the self to its surroundings and what happens to the self when it is uprooted or threatened in The Grapes of Wrath. In Chapter 11, Mr. Steinbeck gives a discourse on the relationship of man to his work and his land. The farmer who works and lives on the land he works on develops an understanding with the nature of the land simply because he is there, allowing for time and the passing of the seasons to form a bond between the farmer and his land. It is a kind of understanding that a day laborer, someone who only comes to work for the day and drives home at the end of it, cannot gain or even understand, because time is not allowed to form the same bond that exists between the living-in farmer and the land. Circumstances in the form of industrialization, however, have forced the farmer to be uprooted from the land. Because he has nowhere else to go, he goes away to seek another place where he can take root once more and survive. He becomes a migrant. In the journey, as shown in Chapter 15, he tries to maintain his dignity despite his abject poverty. He tries to stand down the hostility he meets in the likes of Mae the café waitress, insisting that he be given bread worth only ten cents because he can only afford to pay for bread worth ten cents. Come Chapter 21, this all changes. The farmer who is now a migrant arrives in the land where he thought he could take root once more and hope for better things, only to find that there are others with him that are more than willing to fight for the limited opportunities that are presented to them. The quiet dignity that prevailed despite the hardships on the road to their so-called paradise gives in to anger and to the need to survive. Mr. Steinbeck writes: As time went on, there were fewer farms. The little farmers moved into town for a while and exhausted their credit, exhausted their friends, their relatives. And then they too went on the highways. And the roads were crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work (313). The need for the self to survive is such that the person will abase himself in order for it to happen. Such is the idea of the self. It has its needs that it alone can determine, needs that may or may not run in conformity to society’s standards. A person and the needs of his self will drive him to do whatever it takes so that the needs will be met, that the self survives. The second part of this essay is an extended analysis of Chapter 11, 15 and 21 of Mr. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Written in 1939, the novel describes the plight of the farmers in Oklahoma who were uprooted from their farms and forced to migrate to California during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Overcultivation of the land as well as drought caused the land to be barren. Because they cannot produce to keep the land in their hands and pay the mortgage, and because they cannot afford to invest in machinery they need to compete with commercial farms, these farmers lose their lands. The tone of these three chapters is desolate. They do not really depict what happens to the Joad family, around which the story revolves, but rather gives the reader a general portrait of the conditions prevailing during the migration of Oklahoma farmers in California. In Chapter 11, as stated in the first part of the essay, Mr. Steinbeck describes that the land that the farmers were forced to leave has lost its life because the farmer that cares for it and understands it is gone. The day laborer, the tractor driver who has come to replace the resident farmer could not give the same life to the land as the farmer once did because of the tractor driver’s lack of understanding or sympathy for the land. To the tractor driver, this is just work to him, not his life; whereas the farmer treats the land as his life. And thus we see the land and the houses once tended by the farmer and his families fall into disrepair, invaded by animals of the wild. In Chapter 15, we meet Mae the café waitress who is always on the lookout for truck drivers because they eat well, pay well and leave tips, and Al, the taciturn cook. They tend this café along Highway 66 with the hopes of attracting business from truck drivers driving their loads down the highway, who are the main source of the café’s income, and that of the other cafes along that highway. They treat the truck driver almost with reverence; in contrast, the businessman who happens to stop by with his wife is treated with contempt because people like that raise pretentious airs, using up too many paper napkins and complaining that the soda drink is not cold enough. But despite the pretentious airs, that is all that the couple buys, a couple of bottles of soda drink worth five cents each. One afternoon, while Mae is entertaining a couple of truck drivers, a migrant family from Oklahoma on its way to California stops over at the café. Mae, who was previously making comments to the truck drivers she is serving that she heard that these migrants are dangerous people and are prone to stealing, shows hostility to the father who came in with his boys to ask to buy bread worth ten cents. Mae refuses to entertain the father and insists that the café is not a grocery store. Also, the bread they have is worth fifteen cents and if they did sell the man a loaf, they might run short of bread. Mae relents after Al insists that she sell the man an entire loaf for ten cents instead of fifteen. Later, Mae hints that she does feel pity for the family when she sells the man candy for the boys for two pieces a penny, when the candy is actually worth a nickel each. Mae gets her just reward when the truck drivers who witnessed the event gave her a generous tip. The picture gets more ominous in Chapter 21. The migrants arrive in California expecting to find work and some semblance of a life that is far much better than the life they had to lead on the road to their destination. But instead of work and the good life, what they find are other starving migrants competing fiercely for what work that is available to them. They are met with hostility and suspicion by the locals, and the providers of work take advantage of the situation by hiring workers who are willing to be paid for as low as they go. To quote Mr. Steinbeck: And the migrants streamed in on the highways and their hunger was in their eyes, and their need was in their eyes. They had no argument, no system, nothing but their numbers and their needs. When there was work for a man, ten men fought for it – fought with a low wage. If that fella’ll work for thirty cents, I’ll work for twenty-five (312). It is a sad picture that Mr. Steinbeck painted in these three chapters of his novel. It must be an accurate picture, because he stayed with a migrant family from Oklahoma and traveled with them to California when he was writing this novel. When it was published, The Grapes of Wrath was reviled by Californians and Oklahomans because they claimed that the novel does not give a flattering picture of the situation back then. The novel nonetheless brought to American consciousness the plight of these migrant workers. Mr. Steinbeck won a Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1940 (Sparknotes). It is not surprising that the Californians and the Oklahomans have expressed hatred for The Grapes of Wrath. Unfairness and taking advantage of man against a fellow man who is downtrodden and suffering is never a flattering picture. That it has happened ought to bring shame upon those who have oppressed and taken advantage of the people they are supposed to help. As the novel says, it is not the drought or the bad weather in Oklahoma that drove these farmers off their lands; the rich industrialist competitors who are in the position to help these farmers but have eyes only for profit are the ones who did. It is these landowners and businessmen’s self-interest that is the cause of these dislocated families’ suffering. As Mr. Steinbeck put it: And this was good, for wages went down and prices stayed up. The great owners were glad and they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down and prices stayed up. And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again (313). Despite the despair prevalent in The Grapes of Wrath, a spark of hope was shown to exist in the form of Mae the café waitress in Chapter 15. Despite her initial hostility, she was able to look beyond her prejudice against the migrant family that came to her doorstep, enough to be able to feel pity for them. It is a spark of hope because it means that not all in the world is evil, and even if a person is down on his knees, he can still count on the possibility that such a person like Mae exists. works cited Dictionary.com. Selfhood. 30 April 2006. Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” A Complete Course in Freshman English. Ed. Harry Shaw. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. 580-586. Smith, Mark K. Selfhood. 30 Jan. 2005. 27 April 2006. Sparknotes. The Grapes of Wrath. 30 April 2005. < http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/ grapesofwrath/> Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Pennsylvania: Penguin Books, 1980. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 17 Feb. 2006. 27 April 2006. Read More