Comparing Different Writing Styles and Thematic Aspects of Literary Works - Term Paper Example

Comparison and contrasts between works by different based on style, matter or theme: This paper is going to critically analyze different writing styles and thematic aspects of literary works by women authors hailing from the United States of America, Europe and India. The timeline spans about 150 years, starting from the beginning of the 19th century to modern era. I have chosen five eminent authors: Harriet Jacobs, Audre Lorde, May Sarton, Bharati Mukherjee and Slavenka Drakulic. Before looking into the signatory style, areas of work and thematic characteristics, let’s begin with the brief introduction of each of these authors. The impact of Afro-American literature on modern literary realm goes beyond the stylistic and aesthetics of writing. The gruesome picture of racism, social discrimination and many other contemporary issues has been depicted by Afro-American authors. Harriet Jacobs, a writer, reformer and abolitionist, was a 19th century Afro-American literary figure (Yale University, 2009) who was also known as the ‘fugitive slave author’ of the American slave narrative Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Her active involvement in reform movements before, during and after the Civil War, and her own experience of slavery for 29 years helped her sketch her characters poignantly and realistically. Modern day readers and scholars would have been in the darkness about the life and works of Harriet Jacobs unless the revolutionary work of Professor Jean Fagan Yellin who, by dint of extensive research and studies, authored her biography: Harriet Jacobs: A Life. This book received the 2004 Frederick Douglass Book Prize for its immaculate detailing about how Jacob’s literature was shaped by her turbulent life. (Yale University, 2009) Audre Lorde, born in New York City in 1934, is renowned for her poems, essays and novels. She was brought up in Manhattan and was sent to Catholic school where her first poem was published in ‘Seventeen’ magazine. Lorde got her B. A. from Hunter College and Masters in Library Sciences from Columbia University. Her professional career, which began as a librarian in New York public schools, saw many turn of events as she later on got an employment as a writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. It was here when she discovered an inclination for pedagogy, and at the end of her tenure here in 1968, her first volume of poems ‘The First Cities’ was brought out. She also met her long-term partner Frances Clayton in Tougaloo. (Poets.org, 1997-2009) Born in 1912 to parents one of which was a strict disciplinarian and another a creative individual, May Sarton was one of the thought-provoking women poets Belgium has ever produced. After the Sartons settled in the United States of America in 1916 following the German aggression in Belgium, May was sent to Shady Hill School where she was introduced to the world of poetry by Agnes Hocking. Immediately her inborn capacity to weave magic with words was recognized by others, and she was groomed to be the poet she was to become in the coming years by her mentor Agnes Hocking. Later on she recollected those fond years in her journal ‘I Knew a Phoenix’. May received her undergraduate degree from the High and Latin School in Cambridge in 1929. It was during this time when she developed an interest for theaters too, especially after seeing a stupendous performance of Eva Le Gallienne in The Cradle Song. She then joined Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theater in New York to pursue her newly-found passion. But her focus on writing poems never got tilted while she was busy learning acting and perfecting her choral skills. Just at the age of seventeen she wrote a series of sonnets that was published in ‘Poetry’ magazine in 1930. (Penn Libraries, 2002-2004) Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengalee by birth and a global citizen by passion and profession, is instantaneously identified with the theme of migration and resultant alienation by critics and readers alike. Raised in Kolkata (then Calcutta) for the first seven years of her life, her family arrived in the United Kingdom in 1947. During the three and half year long stay in the United Kingdom, Mukherjee’s creative bent of mind became apparent as she wrote a number of short stories. She received her B. A. from the University of Calcutta in 1959 and her Masters in English and Ancient Indian Culture from the University of Baroda in 1961. Upon coming to the United States of America in 1963 Mukherjee enrolled herself in the University of Lowa and got her M. F. A. in creative writing as well as Ph. D. in English and Comparative Literature in 1969. Together with her life partner Clark Blaise whom she met at the University of Lowa, she penned down two books along with numerous other independent works. (Emory, 2009) Individualism, both in domestic as well as social circle, is a recurrent theme in post-modern literature. The name of Slavenka Drakulic comes to the forefront of discussion when it comes to contemporary European writers who have addressed to the effects of communism and war on Eastern European women from an individualistic perspective. Born to parents who were politically allied to communism, Drakulic never held herself back from disapproving of communism. This Croatian-born internationally acclaimed author sparkled in three spheres with élan: as a journalist serving as the Eastern European correspondent for ‘Ms.’ magazine and as a donor to ‘Danas’, a major political journal in Croatia; as an essayist and as a novelist. (Enotes, 2009) So we have seen that the authors in discussion in this paper belong to different times and most importantly, to different genres of writing. In order to critically compare the diverse points of views that contributed to their creative inspiration, first of all we need to consider the thematic subtleties reflected in their works. By closely examining the Harriet Jacobs Papers Project, one can get a clear perception of the writing nuances of Harriet Jacobs. As stated earlier, this nearly-forgotten literary genius got a rebirth thanks to the enormous work put in by her biographer Professor Jean Fagan Yellin. Apart from the biographical sketch written by Yellin, modern readers can avail themselves of the epistolary documents published by the University of North Carolina Press. These letters do give an insight into the mind of the author who survived a harrowing time, spending 29 years of slavery. In one of the letters to Amy Post, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, Jacobs expressed her reservations about discussing her torment: “Your proposal to me has been thought over and over again but not with out some most painful rememberances.” These words and thought processes are reflected time and again in the collection of 15 documents that have been retrieved so far. The depression born of falling prey to a sexual predator found a touching expression in another of her letters to Amy Post: “Woman can whisper—her cruel wrongs into the ear of a very dear friend—much easier than she can record them for the world to read.” While the trying times left an indelible scar in Jacob’s heart, she never lost sight of the beauty of language, which is such an integral part of a writer’s armor. This is reflected in one of the notes written by Lydia Maria Child to Jacobs in 1860: “I have very little occasion to alter the language, which is wonderfully good...”. The subject matter and theme of her works mainly dealt with what she personally went through and what she worked for – abolition of slavery. In Life Among the Contrabands, she puts in words her experience while serving as a relief worker for the fugitives who had fled to Washington D. C.: “I found men, women and children all huddled together, without any distinction or regard to age or sex. Some of them were in the most pitiable condition.” (Yale University, 2009) To sum up the essence of Audre Lorde’s works in a sentence, it is worth taking a look at what poet Adrienne Rich commented on ‘The Black Unicorn’, one of her poetic masterpieces: “Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity.” Again, poet Sandra M. Gilbert observed a few traits in Lorde’s poetry that set her apart from her contemporaries. After the publication of ‘Chosen Poems Old and New’ (1982) and ‘Our Dead Behind Us’ (1986), Gilbert found Lorde capable of “of rare and, paradoxically, loving jeremiads.” The outspoken nature of the poet also came under severe criticism, especially by Jesse Helms. It was mainly to do with the sexual undertones that some of her works have. Responding to the criticism Lorde said to Callaloo: “My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds. . . . Jesse Helmss objection to my work is not about obscenity . . .or even about sex. It is about revolution and change. . . . Helms knows that my writing is aimed at his destruction, and the destruction of every single thing he stands for.” (Poets.org, 1997-2009) The thematic aspects of Audre Lorde’s works are primarily based on pride, anger, love, hatred, fear, negligence, sexual oppression, racism and personal survival. Being a poet and not a novelist or essayist, her themes do differ from those of Jacobs or Drakulic. As a self-critic, she sees her works in the light of truth: “I feel have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.” While her earlier works deal with themes of isolation and imposed strictness of daily life, majority of her mature works explore ‘marginalizations’ to unmask the social system that prompts a sensitive mind to reach out for illusive sense of satisfaction. The fact that any modern day society is fearful of differences and change is a frequent theme in her writing. The truthfulness in recognizing that “imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness” lends an authentic charm to her poetry. Traces of feminism, as debated frequently, hinder the growth and maturity of a writer. But Lorde’s feminist outlooks have a positive and constructive effect on understanding power relations and oppressions. The stylistic aspects of Lorde’s poetry were natural yet profound. From her younger days she had an affinity towards words, and she used to communicate with others by reciting poems. According to her, “Words had an energy and power and I came to respect that power early. Pronouns, nouns, and verbs were citizens of different countries, who really got together to make a new world.” The poems that she wrote during her adolescent days echoed the simplest of feelings of an adolescent girl expressed in the most universal manner possible. Her poetry was "very important to [her] in terms of survival, in terms of living.” She explicated, “I loved poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. Thats the beginning of social protest.” (University of Illinois, Department of English, 2008) Lorde’s first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), marked the beginning of a new stylistic era in Afro-American literature. Mere wordplay for the sake of it, or unnecessary rhetorical ambiguity was done away with, and this fetched her critical acclamation from many quarters. The innovative approach was justly reviewed by fellow poet and critic Dudley Randall: "[Lorde] does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone." (Afterellen.com, 2006) Her second volume ‘Cables to Rage’ (1970) is about themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and complications of raising children. The poem ‘Martha’ in this volume is noticeably important for it affirms the traits of homosexuality of the poet herself. The existential crisis of a woman in an age of uncertainties forms the core theme in ‘From a Land Where Other People Live’. The scope of a poet’s visionary growth is realized fully in this volume as she voices her opinions and concerns as a mother, friend and lover. Expressions of anger, terror, love, loneliness and impatience light up the pages of ‘From a Land Where Other People Live’. (University of Illinois, Department of English, 2008) The works of May Sarton resonate with a passion for exploring the unknown. The way she was brought up by her parents left a profound impact on her writing career. The subject matter of her first novel The Single Hound (1938) was directly picked up from the company she was in at the time of writing the novel. Shortly after her family moved to Europe, Sarton found herself amidst a galaxy of authors and theater personalities, including Virginia Woolf, Julian and Juliette Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen, S. S. Koteliansky, Lugné-Pöe and Basil de Sélincourt. But with the failure of her Associated Actors Theater in 1935 she came back to writing for the rest of her life. The creative aspirations Sarton had from her mother in her childhood never departed the poet throughout a life of rich and voluminous works. She wrote novels and poems simultaneously, and these two different genres complemented each other in her works. By the time the volume of poetry ‘Inner Landscape’ (1939) was published, the novel Fire in the Mirror was completed too. For a brief period in the 1940s she wrote documentary scripts for the United States War Information Office in New York. A succession of novels and poetry volumes appeared in the late 1940s and in the beginning of the 1950s, including The Bridge of Years, ‘The Lion and the Rose’, Shadow of a Man, Shower of Summer Days and ‘The Land of Silence’. ‘The Land of Silence’ is widely considered to be one of her signature works, which earned her the coveted Reynolds Lyric Award. I Knew a Phoenix, May Sarton’s journal, which was brought out in 1954 took her fanfare to dizzying heights and thus making her an internationally recognized author. From this point onwards one can trace a significant change in terms of maturity and thematic intricacies both in novels and poems. This is reflected with the publication of two simultaneous publications – Faithful Are the Wounds and ‘In Time Like Air’, the former being a novel and the latter a volume of poetry. Both were nominated for a National Book Award, and even though neither won the award, ‘In Time Like Air’ is one of the critically acclaimed volumes of poetry written by May Sarton. Later works of Sarton are often identified with themes of feminism and lesbianism. This is particularly true with Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965). This novel generated a tremendous enthusiasm in scholarly realms, notably in feminist circles. The text was included in the academic curriculum of universities and numerous Women Studies programs. Criticisms appeared in feminist journals too, tagging May Sarton as a feminist writer. While she enjoyed the hype and fame, she never wanted to be labeled with such a dubious distinction either. It limited the reach and insight of her works to a great extent. However, in the years to come she had written a number of novels that were based on more generic themes of marital life and domestic affairs. The poetry of May Sarton was full of imageries and artistic freedom. One of her best known collections of poems ‘A Private Mythology’ was an experimental project with free verse, the first of its kind in her writing career. A rich vein of imageries is found in volumes such as ‘Cloud, Stone, Sun and Vine’ and ‘As Does New Hampshire’. Plant Dreaming Deep, arguably the canonical work of Sarton, captured some of the most poignant truths a single woman can possibly express in words. This memoir earned her a lifelong friendship with Carolyn Heilbrun, who, after the publication of “Journal of a Solitude” in 1973, commented, “I would name 1972 as the turning point for modern women’s autobiography… the publication of Journal of a Solitude in 1973 may be acknowledged as the watershed in women’s autobiography.” This memoir was written to neutralize the benign submission expressed in Plant Dreaming Deep. Sarton’s third memoir A World of Light: Portraits and Celebrations sums up her philosophy toward living and writing adequately. It captures the spirit of friendship, companionship, commitment and inspiration Sarton experienced between the times she had written I Knew a Phoenix and Plant Dreaming Deep. In fact the works of May Sarton had always been shaped and influenced by the luminous company she belonged to throughout her life. (Penn Libraries, 2002-2004) Bharati Mukherjee focused on issues that stand in stark contrast to what has been normally addressed by women authors. Identity crisis and the themes of social and intellectual alienation found a prominence in her works. Being an Indian expatriate in Canada, she expressed the phenomenon of migration and the status of new immigrants eloquently. Mukherjee’s earlier works as an upcoming writer who had to shift places time and again reflect an individual’s longing to cling on to the root. This is particularly notable in Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Tiger’s Daughter. The Tiger’s Daughter tells a heartrending tale of a young girl who finds herself in poverty and disorder after she comes back to India. The autobiographical elements can be traced as Mukherjee herself faced similar situations after she ventured back to India with Clark Blaise in 1973. Mukherjee’s exposure to different ethnic and cultural backdrops enabled her to view the contemporary Indian society with a radically different but humanistic perspective. In her works, she despises the ill-treatment of women in the name of tradition: “What is unforgivable is the lives that have been sacrificed to notions of propriety and obedience” (Emory, 2009). Mukherjee’s mature works focus on themes of marital relationships and loneliness. Wife, the short stories in Darkness and The Sorrow and the Terror reflect the struggle of an individual in the face of social evils like racism and stifling possessiveness. In these works, she gave vent to the humiliation she experienced in Canada. Mukherjee’s collection of short stories Isolated Incidents puts together scattered imageries of immigrant women and their plight in Canada. A short story entitled ‘The Tenant’ is about a divorced Indian woman and her experiences with interracial relationships. Te feminist outlook is quite apparent here: “All Indian men are wife beaters, Maya [the narrator] says. She means it and doesnt mean it.” (Emory, 2009) The elements of fear and confusion recur in Mukherjee’s works. In Wife, she tells of a Bengali married woman who, out of fear and mental shakiness, kills her husband and commits suicide. Themes of revenge and vengeance for being neglected are also prominent in some of Mukherjee’s works. In Leave It to Me, she tells the somewhat disturbing story of a young woman who plans to take revenge on parents who had forsaken her. The emotional complexities arousing from a neglected childhood prompt the protagonist to misbehave with kind-hearted adoptive parents. By and large, Mukherjee’s candid approach in choosing subject matters and representing them with intellectual as well as emotional freedom has endeared her to critics and readers alike. The comment made by Candia McWilliam of The London Review of Books is worth quoting: “A writer both tough and voluptuous in her works.” Seamlessly moving between fiction and non-fiction and excelling in both; an outspoken individual who doesn’t hold herself back in criticizing the evils of communism and last but not the least, an out-of-the-block thinker – these traits sum up Slavenka Drakulic, one of Croatia’s most influential authors in modern times. The narrative technique deployed in Holograms of Fear provides a dramatic thrust, especially with the kind of subject matter it deals with. Mother-daughter relationships have been perceived from a different dimension in the novel Mramoma Koza (1989). The protagonist of the novel carves an erotic sculpture of her mother. It deteriorates the relationship between the daughter and the mother, and when she tries to reconcile the troubled relationship, the daughter is abused by her stepfather. Moving away from the post-modern grotesqueness and tension in domestic circle, Drakulic also ventures into political turmoil in Eastern Europe. One of the most read non-fictions How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed portrays the failure of communism in the light of feminism in Eastern European countries of Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. This essay focuses on a broad spectrum of subject matters, arraying from the subjugation of women by communist power to the domestic impact of scarcity of essential commodities. The influence of a nation on an individual is described in Sterben in Kroatian: Vom Krieg mitten in Europa. Written in the backdrop of the Balkan War in the beginning of the 1990s, this collection of essays objectively discusses the psychological void felt when an individual is deprived of education, profession and personality under the constraints of a nation. Compared to fictions, the non-fictional works of Drakulic have received wider accolades from the critics. One of the key features of her prose style is conciseness. A particular school of thought believes that a succinct prose style may lend a monotonous effect on plots and characterizations in fiction writing. This may be cited as an important reason why Slavenka Drakulic still remains to be one of the authoritative and objective voices of protest in modern day Europe. (Enotes, 2009) References 1. “Harriet Jacobs: Selected Writings and Correspondence”. Yale University. 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.yale.edu/glc/harriet/docs.htm on February 6, 2009 2. “Audre Lorde”. Poets.org. 1997-2009. Retrieved from: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/306 on February 6, 2009 3. Blouin, Lenora P. “May Sarton: A Poet’s Life”. Penn Libraries. 2002-2004. Retrieved from: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sarton/blouin-biography.html on February 6, 2009 4. “Bharati Mukherjee”. Emory. 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Mukherjee.html on February 6, 2009 5. “Slavenka Drakulic 1949-”. Enotes. 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/drakulic-slavenka on February 6, 2009 6. “Audre Lorde on Poetry and Activism”. University of Illinois, Department of English. 2008. Retrieved from: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lorde/activism.htm on February 6, 2009 7. Mendenhall, Alexandra. “Remembering Audre Lorde”. Afterellen.com. Retrieved from: http://www.afterellen.com/archive/ellen/People/2006/4/lorde.html on February 6, 2009 Read More