ESSAY CEMETERY

Walker describes Jean Toomer's exploration of the Reconstruction South. Toomer found women sexually abused and lost, but who he saw to hold power, spirituality and beauty of which they were not aware. They were waiting for these unknowns to be made known. In the meantime they did not appreciate any aspects of life. These black women were artists whose creative forces were abandoned to the hardships of life. Black women who were able to create such as Phillis Wheatley and Zora Hurston had divided loyalties, between black and white cultures. They were raised in both and their art is not genuinely hers but confused due to this. Many have criticized Wheatley's poetry for glorifying white people but Walker understands that art for Phyllis was a soulful practice and it sustained her. This is not the end of the story, for the next generation of black women has survived. There is now the quest for black female identity. Society is not understanding of this strife. The quest...

Everyone in the tavern is amazed by Faith's father, an old man, having written another song. They are used to artistic production coming from the young. Philip, Faith's lover, reads the poem aloud later that night in the kitchen. The poem expresses the misery that her father experienced since her mother's death, as well as a longing for a young girl who waits for him. Faith thinks the young girl is her mother, young and Philip thinks it's a different girl entirely. They argue about old and young people, about Faith's ex-husband, about her writing. Faith gets upset and sad. They talk about poetry and Phil's ex-wife Anita, Faith's friend, and she asks him not to bring her up. Faith, Richard and Anthony (Faith's children) go to visit Faith's father, Mr. Darwin, in an old-age home that also houses infirm young people. He can tell Faith isn't too happy. They talk about Ricardo, Faith's ex-husband. Her father tells them about a volume of s...

Paley used to only write poetry. This was done using her "ear for literature". Sometime in the mid 1950s Paley had an urge to write, but poetry was not the way to express it. The "beginning of big luck" happened: she got sick and her children had to go to all-day daycare for a few weeks. During this time she succeeded in writing several stories. She wrote them using her other "ear", her "home ear"- the faculty in her that let her be in touch with her early experiences. Early on, as a woman who was no longer a boy, Paley realized that she would be writing domestic fiction. Luck number one. A friend of Paley's made her ex-husband read Paley's work. This ex-husband was a publisher, and he published ten short stories by Paley. The "big luck" is the politics that went on around Paley as she was living her domestic life. This meant Paley, every woman writer in fact, was part of the second wave of the feminist movement. Activi...

Summary Men make war, even though it injures them terribly. Paley asks: how do they come to live this way? When Paley was a little girl, she was a boy. She wanted to continue being a boy and to go to war and do other boy things, a notion that changed only experiencing WWII. She lived in Army camps with her husband much of the time, which she liked because of the boys and the action. As she began to live her own life as a writer and otherwise, she stopped wanting to be a boy; in fact, she thought it was the worst thing that she could never identify with. And after she had children she began to notice the women around her, to really live among women, and ascribe importance to them. She began rejecting the notion that men lived exciting compelling lives. She began to be interested in women.  This is how she came to write about women. She began to explore the female terrain with which she was unfamiliar through her stories. Even though she felt what she was writing was triv...

Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing and Patrick Marber's Closer , written fifteen years later, have much in common. The plays are structured in two acts and twelve scenes. Both feature two principal couples who exchange partners, one of whom is a writer; the characters frequently lie, cheat and make false assumptions about one another; meta-literary and self-reflexive techniques are often used to endow both works with additional depth. The Real Thing and Closer are also both set in London. Although the plays share the same urban setting, the backdrop of the city is utilized in different ways, and with a very different effect.             Closer is set almost entirely in public spaces. Alice, Dan, Larry and Anna move between a hospital, an aquarium, a gallery and a museum, a restaurant and a public park. In all of these, of course, privacy is out of the question. When the characters are situated in locations inaccessible t...

Featuring exclusively female characters, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls is indeed filled with remarkable women. The 1988 play contains women from across the globe who have distinguished themselves over the span of a thousand years, from Joan, the ninth-century pope, to Marlene, a twentieth-century career woman. The women, despite their vastly diverse backgrounds, have all had to sacrifice their femininity, freedom, and their families in order to pursue their individual goals in a male-dominated, male-oriented world. Churchill cleverly uses historical figures to create powerful criticism of contemporary feminism, particularly of that present in 1980s England, and explores what it really means to be a "top girl". With disorienting theatrical and linguistic technique, she ensures the audience's active participation and encourages critical socio-political thinking and self-reflexivity.             From its very beginning, the play diso...

Themes ·        Art ·        Popularity ·        Money ·        Metaliterary criticism ·        Suspicion ·        Tension Style and devices ·        Answering a question with a question ·        Repression/ reluctance to deal ·        The scenes are ordered backwards in time, except for scenes 5, 6, 7 which are in chronological order. ·        Dialogue that occurs on two levels because the knowledge of both sides doesn’t agree. Response ·        Tension regarding intellectual things – Emma has an inferiority complex? ROBERT: Oh… not much more to say on that subject, really, is there? EMMA: What do you consider the su...

Scene I The play begins in a pub in the spring of 1977. Emma and Jerry are drinking together. Emma is friendly and tries to get Jerry to be friendly. Jerry opens up when he's had a couple of drinks. They are both married with kids; they had a marital affair for seven years. Jerry is a literary agent and Emma's husband Robert is a publisher. Emma shares that she might separate from her husband, because he has been cheating on her. Robert and Jerry are friends. They recall when they used to be in love. Jerry had bought a house to which they would sneak off. Jerry brings up Casey, a man with whom Emma is rumored to have been having an affair. Emma says she told Robert about the affair during a long conversation of the night before. Jerry feels bad because of his friendship with Robert. Scene II Robert and Jerry are in Jerry's house. It is still the spring of 1977. Jerry has invited Robert. He has a hard time saying anything and Robert brings up the issue...