Monday, October 24, 2011

Journal #10: The Aha! Moment




The moment of enlightenment I came to happened in two very different points in the “Learning to read” and “The Wife of his Youth” texts. In Frances E.W. Harper’s “Learning to Read”, I was able to identify that she was a black woman and probably a slave within the first stanza. Throughout the poem, Harper describes the lengths at which slaves went to in order to learn how to read. Once the narrator of this poem had finally learned how to read, she then bought a cabin, “And I felt independent / As the queen upon her throne”. Literacy brought her liberation and gratitude – she was able to control her own life.

In Charles W Chesnutt’s “The Wife of his Youth”, it was not until after ‘Liza Jane had come and talked to him that I realized who Mr. Ryder really was – Sam Taylor. At first I suspected that Mr. Ryder was Sam Taylor when he began questioning why ‘Liza Jane had been looking for this estranged husband for 25 years and asking her what if this man was already married, or dead. However, My Aha! Moment occurred when Chesnutt writes, “When she had turned the corner, he went upstairs to his bedroom, and stood for a long time before the mirror of his dressing-case, gazing thoughtfully at the reflection of his own face” (Chesnutt). Picturing this in my mind helped me to identify where the rest of the story was going to go. On another note, I did not realize that Mr. Ryder was a mulatto, or mixed blood, until Chesnutt had actually stated it. At first I thought he was white, then I thought he was a light skinned black, and then I thought he was white again – the idea was going back and forth through my head the entire time until it was actually in writing. The most significant thing about Mr. Ryder being mixed is that he believed, “… we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by white race extinction in the black. The one doesn’t want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step…” (Chesnutt). This shows the readers that Mr. Ryder believed in the social structure of that time: (1) whites, (2) mulattos (3) African Americans.

Finally, the one thing that I observed that these two texts have in common is the “American Dream”. Both Mr. Ryder and the woman in “Learning to Read” were able to come from a very low-point in society to a higher, more dignified one. In “Learning to Read” her ambitions were not as grand as Mr. Ryder’s. However, buying her own house made her feel like a queen. Mr. Ryder came from working on a plantation, although free, was still going to be sold. He had escaped that and become the head of the Blue Veins Society, had a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and finally was reunited with the love of his life. Both texts show and can inspire readers that however big or small your dream may be, it is possible to obtain.

1 comment:

  1. Great point about the mirror! I wish you had been in class to share it with us.

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