To anyone who might be interested, auditions for the 2007 performance of The Vagina Monologues at YVCC will be held January 10th and 11th, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and again at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. The location hasn't been decided, but will be on the YVCC campus (probably in the Black Box next to the theatre in Kendal Hall or a classroom).

The cast must be all female, but men can help out in lots of other ways behind the scenes. Even if you aren't cast in the performance, anyone who wants to help can. There are lots of ways to help with the performance and with other activities going on during the week of V-Day. (I'll probably post something about the events of V-Day, which is the week of Valentine's Day, later.) "Female" is being defined here as anyone who leads life as a woman and includes those born as women and transgendered individuals, or as one director put it, actresses who live in the world of women, experience the issues of women and who do not have access to the power postion of the male role in today's world.

Students as well as community members of all ages are welcome to audition or otherwise volunteer (usher at the performance, sell tickets, etc.) The week of V-Day is scheduled for February 12th to February 17th, with performances on the 15th, 16th and 17th at Kendal Hall.

Leave me a message if you have any questions. You can also visit www.vday.org if you're not familiar with The Vagina Monologues or the V-Day movement.

Responses to I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

A recurring theme in the past few chapters has been the warmth of morning. I’ve never heard the “surreality” of morning explained in a way that sounded this “right.” It’s odd, though, that she talks about it like it’s comforting, and I’ve always found it disturbing. Maybe the rest of the day has always been better for me. For the men and women working in the cotton fields, it only went downhill.

Uncle Willie was crippled as an infant and our first glimpse of him shows us a bitter, mean man to the narrator and her brother. The one time she can relate to him is when she can see how powerless he feels, like her, when a couple comes into the store and he tires to hide the fact that he’s crippled. “the high-topped shoes and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out, and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them” (13).

Chapter 4 introduces Mr. McElroy, the only black man she knows living in his own house who wears suits and doesn’t go to church, and we hear about her brother, “Where I was elbowy and grating he was small, graceful and smooth. When I was described by our playmates as being shit color, he was lauded for his velvet black skin. His hair fell down in black curls, and my head was covered with black steel wool. And yet he loved me” (22).

Angelou often gives descriptions that involve beauty and specifies their color: “beautiful black hair,” “beautiful Black brother,” “wet brown stones,” etc, and “black” is usually capitalized. Images that are aesthetically pleasing are often brown. The segregation is so complete in Stamps she can’t even believe white people are real, only knows they are opposite, and so when she describes beauty it must be brown – Also the general oppression of black people and the ugliness she feels – she loves and craves beauty that is black.

The story about their parents sending presents one Christmas, though it isn’t the saddest thing I’ve read this quarter, is the only thing that has brought tears to my eyes. Our culture has this idea that kids have it so easy, but childhood is so bittersweet – “wretched feeling of being torn engulfed me. I wanted to scream, “Yes. Tell [Santa Claus] to take them back” (53).

When their father comes for them, she sees him as an “opposite” taking her away from her home and Momma. She first describes him as the first cynic she ever met, the opposite of her faith-guided grandmother, and then later says he sounds more like “a white man than a Negro” – seeing him as the unknown, as the outsider – taking her to see Mother, who is so scary she is revered enough to be referred to as Her.

Themes:

Childhood
Religion – And this idea that the thing to do is be grateful for everything. Page seven shows the family thanking god for having a bed, a roof over their head, etc. These are basic human rights… do we really have to be grateful for them? Of course it’s horrible that some people go without these things, but it isn’t the same thing to say that there are people without shelter, therefore we should be grateful that we do… We should be outraged at not having these things, not dedicating our lives to being thankful for them. Right? I don’t know.
Death
Hierarchy/power struggles – Begins very early with Uncle Willie and the stove.
“Blackness”
Self vs. society – What you are about what society allows you to be – her dad, Bailey, and her – she first explains by wishing she were white, and all the little girls in church would say “we didn’t know who you were” (2). About her father – “It was obvious to me then that he never belonged in Stamps, and less to the slow-moving, slow-thinking Johnson family. How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur” (233). He speaks proper English in a way that suggests education and wealth. As a black man, he was not allowed to become the man he saw himself as. In reality he was born poor and black and would stay poor and black. What would he have become if racism hadn’t held him back? Bailey is now feeling the same conflict (as well as Angelou). The two of them grew up reading Shakespeare, were brilliant children smarter than the white kids they went to school with in San Francisco, and aren’t even allowed to drive trolleys.
Alienation – At four years old their lives have become Fun Houses without the attendant. Bailey and Maya are bounced around between families and are unsure of where they belong.


Characters:

Uncle Willie is mean and bitter at first but becomes loveable and seems protective, yet vulnerable toward the end. For example when Bailey comes home from seeing the black man who drowned, and was frightened at seeing the white man pleased/amused/satisfied at this, and he asks Uncle Willie what black people did to make white people hate them so much, both Uncle Willie and Momma try to protect Bailey from the truth, “They don’t hate us, they’re just scared.”
Momma is painted as clearly as if she were in front of us, and it’s easy to feel her struggle, sadness, quiet worry and pride.
Bailey is the only one I felt I didn’t get a really clear picture of. Her father also seems less clear. Maybe the women in her life were easier for her to understand and portray.
On page 11 when Angelou talks about Uncle Willie, she also describes what life is like for her brother and father, “In our society, where two legged, two-armed strong Black men were able at best to eke out only the necessities of life, Uncle Willie, with his starched shirts, shined shoes and shelves full of food, was the whipping boy and butt of jokes of the underemployed and underpaid. Fate not only disabled him but laid a double-tiered barrier in his path.”




Significant passages:

Page 264 – “My intellectual pride had kept me from selecting typing, shorthand or filing as subjects in school…” Esther (Bell Jar) didn’t want to do shorthand, either. In her case I think this was out of a fear of mediocrity. Angelou describes it as an “intellectual pride,” though. Did Esther also feel pride, or was it just fear? Probably both, but I think it was more of a fear with Esther. I think I pulled out a theme of a “fear of mediocrity” from this sentence and from a few paragraphs on pages 271-272 when she talks about transitioning from youth into adulthood. “Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the murderous pressure of adult conformity.” This is a pretty universal statement, but I think she was also being more specific than I took it at first. She was talking about her place in society as a black woman, how crippling that is to self-identity and self-worth.

“The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste, and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

The paragraphs before this do seem to have pretty universal themes, and I think she makes them specific to black females only in the above paragraph, but I’m not sure that mediocrity is exactly what she’s getting at. It is, however, a great fear of mine and that’s why I found this part of the book so striking. Surrendering to adult conformity, to me, means surrendering to mediocrity, to a boring existence made up of consumption and escapism. Ideas like that always sound snobbish, but as a teenager you’re free (mostly) to be the kind of person you see yourself as, pursuing and creating interests, and what becoming an adult often means is settling into a life mostly occupied with working at a job that you hate. Jobs that are often demeaning, depressing, and don’t pay well enough. You have to work so much just to support yourself and your family that you don’t have the time or money to do anything you want to do. Your hobbies become TV and eating, or other convenient, mind-numbing activities. You lose your identity and become part of this big, stupid mass (if I write a formal paper involving these ideas I won’t be so general and simplistic as to say “big, stupid mass,” but since this is more of a journal kind of thing, I’ll leave that).
The difference here is that Angelou was talking about being forced into adult conformity by racism and sexism, not being allowed by society to develop into a strong, intelligent individual, and I don’t really know what makes the adult life in America so uniform and boring. Maybe men would have something else to say about this? I mentioned these thoughts to a male friend and he didn’t really know what I was talking about; he didn’t share my fear of mediocrity. Esther dreaded becoming a wife and mother, and feared having to give up her writing, her creativity… I don’t think that in today’s society it’s quite as upsetting if a woman doesn’t get married and have children, though there’s certainly still great emphasis placed on romantic relationships and women who don’t get married or have children are often seen as being selfish or cold.
Another great line here: “The command to grow up at once was more bearable than the faceless horror of wavering purpose, which was youth.” I’m not sure I’ve got what she really meant here, but to me, this is the idea of the safety of adult conformity. Having purpose, being intelligent, strong, individual, extraordinary, etc. is harder and in that sense scarier than being an adult (as defined here). There is a safety in mediocrity, but there is also a loss. “The bright hours when the young rebelled against the descending sun had to give way to twenty-four-hour periods called “days” that were named as well as numbered.”

Page 78: “Then there was the pain. A breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can’t. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.”

Page 156: I love this sentence about Momma: “Momma, always self-conscious at public displays of emotions not traceable to a religious source, told me to come with her and we’d bring the bread and bowls.” Not in a delightful sense, really, though it does sound somewhat amusing. In another way it’s actually kind of sad, that Momma has built so many barriers to protect herself and those that she loves that the only passion she’s really comfortable with is for god.

I hope this ends happily. And that my emotional involvement with this text says more about Sylvia Plath's talent than it does about my ability to relate to Esther Greenwood.

When I started reading The Bell Jar, I immediately noticed the way Plath's descriptions include all the five senses at once, including scent. These descriptions are first glimpses into Esther's hypersensitivity to her environment. She describes her surroundings in a very dark way. She admits that she knew something was wrong with her that summer and describes being empty and unable to react.

Attending a women's college in the 50's, she describes her classmates as daughters of wealthy families going to school to "land a man" and become secretaries. Considering the time period, a woman's role in society, and the whole "Pleasantville" obsession with sexual purity, it's interesting that Esther describes a desire for purity (when she talks about taking a hot bath to fix her problems, to feel pure) that seems more a way of thinking about depression (since depression involves a lot of feelings of guilt and worthlessness, it isn't hard to imagine a sense of uncleanliness, or maybe something more like contamination) than conforming to a social standard. Society's concern with purity influences Esther to think of her depression as impure.

When Esther first goes to visit Dr. Gordon, the colors of his office are all beige, and everything looks safe. Perhaps she felt that she could be normal just by being there. But when she goes to his hospital, she's frustrated by the fact that everything looks so normal while "it must be chocked full of crazy people." I think she feels a desire to be like other people, to not be contaminated, but she also feels resentful of society's expectations.

Esther's relationship with Doreen, who is introduced as one of her problems, is interesting in the way that she at once despises Doreen but wants to be like her. Off at a women's college in the 50's, scared and feeling alienated, Esther grabs at different ideas of identity, wanting to be like Doreen but then wanting to be like Betsy, who is the embodiment of purity and proper lady-like behavior. Doreen, to Esther, is unconventional, glamorous, smart and beautiful - perhaps she sees Doreen as a better version of herself. But when Doreen does something to reveal herself as inconsiderate, impure, etc, she starts to identify more with Betsy, who I think she sees as being uncontaminated and light. She writes, "I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should anymore... Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did..."

When Buddy Willard confesses that he's slept with someone, Esther can no longer think of him as anything other than a liar and a hypocrite, and is annoyed by him. Esther mentions how as soon as a man she's attracted to shows interest in her she loses interest. Like that saying (Woody Allen or whoever he was quoting) "I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member," in Buddy Willard's case, maybe after he revealed himself as "impure" Esther believed that anyone he would be attracted to must also be impure.

Something else kind of related to Esther's conflict with purity and identity is the sort of "double life" she creates by hiding her depression from everyone. When she convinces her adviser to let her take a different class so she won't have to take Physics, I for some reason found it deeply disturbing when she says "if she only knew how scared and depressed I was."

Esther's struggle with the oppression of women is pretty clear from pages 81-85, starting with a magazine article her mother sent her about staying pure, and the risks you're taking if you don't. She tires to imagine what being married to Constantin would be like, and imagines basically working as a maid. "This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's." After Buddy Willard tells her she'll feel differently about writing (she won't want to do it anymore) after she has children, Esther begins to resent the idea of marriage and being a wife and mother. Maybe she sees it as something she'll eventually just have to live with, or maybe she rejects the idea entirely - I think a bit of both.

Esther also has a very deep way of sensing and imagining. She's hypersensitive to her surroundings and this contributes to her imaginings of surreal circumstances and ideas. Her clothes "seemed to have a separate, mulish identity all their own, that refused to be washed and folded and stowed." "I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself at night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off onto me at last." Describing this as a "dim idea" seems perfectly fitting to these kind of surreal, abstract ideas that are influenced by "the bell jar." Part of a covering that distorts senses and ideas.

When Esther goes home for the summer, she learns that she can't take the writing course she planned to take over the break, and sinks into a very static depression. She describes her mother's house as a "large but escape-proof cage." She's feeling trapped, alienated, numb, and starting to hear her own voice as "strange and hollow." Staying at her mom's house with nothing to do but listen to her mother nag her about learning short hand, her feelings of isolation must be double-fold. Her attempts at spending her time usefully end up dying out - she doesn't have the will to continue. The part on pages 120-122 where she describes trying to write a story is really interesting. When she pictures her heroine, she's also in her old yellow night gown, "staring into space as well." Every part of her is so immobilized, it’s as if every level of her psyche has come to a halt and can't start up again.

I was really struck by her description of not being able to sleep on page 128. "I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next has suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue."

It's also interesting how she can reveal so much just by saying she doesn't want to do her laundry. All she can see is doing laundry over and over again, and feels exhausted by the thought. "I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it."

This is around the time that she sees Dr. Gordon and starts being really resentful of "normality" and convention. She's annoyed by Dr. Gordon's smiling family portrait and how he's turned the picture just enough so his patients can see it. She goes to the hospital that looks pretty but is "chocked full of crazy people." After her suicide attempt and she goes to the hospital, it seems like she's acquired this acceptance of being "crazy" instead of trying to be "pure."

At the hospital part of Esther's recovery seems to be taking control of conflicts she's dealt with - purity, oppression of women, etc. She starts doing what she wants in regard to men, virginity, and herself.

Joan was one of the really sad things in The Bell Jar and I wonder if she was a real person and what exactly Plath was getting at with her. By that I mean I don't know how genuine Joan was supposed to seem. When she first shows up and says "I read about you and ran away" to Esther, she seems a little fake. Esther later describes Joan as a replica of herself around to "follow and torment" her. Joan comes from the same place - the same school and same pressures - this issue of purity and lack of identity. Esther at once despises and feels for Joan, and toward the end I think she's very affected by the fact that she was being "reborn," but Joan didn't make it.