Honors 102 Final

Sor Filotea

• the pseudonym for the Bishop of Puebla, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz

• the letter from him criticizes Sor Juana for studying and writing on secular subjects rather than sacred ones and reprimands her for ingratitude

the rhetorical structure of the Response

1. Exordium: the introduction, opening, or hook

2. Narratio: the context or background of the topic

3. Proposito and Partitio: the claim/stance and the argument

4. Confirmatio and Refutatio (the Confirmation and Refutation): gives positive and negative proofs of support

5. Peroratio: a summary of the discourse and a call to action

• considered to be the first feminist manifesto

Exordium

• modesty topos - presenting herself as humble at the beginning of the writing, but also attacks the bishop

  • even denies using it

• begins with irony

• Sor Juana addresses her Response to Sor Filotea

  • she knows that the Bishop of Puebla wrote the letter that attacked her, but responding to “Sor Filotea” justifies Sor Juana’s use of a more casual tone

• sometimes silence isn’t the right choice. Sor Juana’s response explicitly considers and rejects silence as a response to the letter from Sor Filotea

Phaeton

• Sor Juana potentially eludes to him

  • the people who love Sor Juana and tell her to stop are hurting her most

• son of Helios

  • he can’t pull the sun like his dad and dies

  • warring against something that’s not meant for you

Narratio

• the first sentence of section I uses the word “narration”

• outlines the basic context for the discourse and the basics of the argument. Sor Juana uses this section of the argument to recount her own personal narrative

  • the teacher who taught Sor Juana and her sister to read

    • still in touch with teacher

    • what began as a joke turned into something earnest

  • cheese

    • food and body (connection between mind and body) and kitchen as the women’s domain

  • haircuts

    • see of later argument of university should be available to girls

    • dedication; can’t overcome her inclination

  • why enter the convent

    • to avoid marriage

    • studying is her calling, but has to overcome things in convents she doesn’t like

the intellect and the body

• traditional view: the mind is good but is compromised by the fact you have a body

• Sor Juana’s portrayal of the female intellectual is markedly different from the classical image of the bodiless masculine mind

  • although the body potentially imperils learning in her early years, as a mature adult she learns to accommodate the body’s lessons and acknowledge its needs

  • knowledge comes with the body and mind working together

Proposito and Partitio

• the Claim and the Argument

• God put the inclination to study in her nature; her love of knowledge is beyond her control. She is made to excel by God, and she is hated for her excellence

  • in men, this would be celebrated

• all human beings’ intelligence is the same; regardless of gender, all human beings’ intelligence comes from the same source, their creator

Confirmatio and Refutatio

• Sor Juana repeatedly uses the words “I find” and then names an exemplary woman as positive proof. In Spanish, the word for “I find” is “veo,” which means I see

  • the repeated use of “veo” corresponds to putting proof before the eyes of those judging the case

  • the Church lets women write even if they aren’t saints

• gives a refutation to the arguments that women shouldn’t study scripture

• argues for women’s education and laments the lack of women teachers for girls

• reason for silence=to make listening possible

• defense of her writing the Athenagoric letter

  • mocks the trouble Fernández de Santa Cruz went to to publish her Athenagoric letter

  • the tone becomes less hostile

The Magnificat

• defense of Sor Juana writing in verse: the Virgin Mary also created poetry in her song of praise known as the Magnificat

• connection/relationship with women gives rise to creativity

Peroratio

• what human could repay God for all God has given them?

• apology: apology for how she has been addressing Sor Filotea/ the bishop; as if vos (the informal “you” in Spanish) were too familiar

  • but really an apology for the tone she has been using to speak to the Bishop and all the times she called him “señora”

frenulum

• thin flap under tongue

• need a long one to be an opera singer

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)

• met other famous musicians in Milan

• studies French, German, and Italian operas

• known almost entirely for his operas

• first opera was rejected because his writing couldn’t be read

• musical technique

  • leit motif: a German technique where there’s a theme that represents a character, object, or mood that follows that character, object, or mood throughout the composition

kami

a word used in prayer that means" “god” or “spirit”

Izaghi and Izanami

Italianization of “Izanagi” and “Izanami,” the mythic gods who created the islands of Japan

Bonzo

Italianization of “Bonze,” a term for a Buddhist monk Nakodo - a matchmaker or marriage negotiator

Mikado

a Japanese emperor

Shosi

Italianization of “shoji,” which refers to a paper screen door, such as the one Butterfly punches holes into to be able to watch for Pinkerton

Geisha

female entertainer (singer, dancer) and host

operatic characteristics

• 3 big traditions: Italian, French, German

• Italian: singer is focus, not orchestra

• French: focuses on libretto; incorporates choruses and ballets

• German: focuses on voice being interwoven with orchestra

historical perspective for Madama Butterfly

push for nationalism in European music at the end of the 19th century to try to break away from German domination in music

exoticism

• trying to give a sense of something far away - U.S, Japan

• Paris World’s Fair led to the interest in exotic music

• many songs in Butterfly are traditional Japanese

pentatonic scale

five notes

whole tone scale

six notes

inspiration for Madama Butterfly

a theatrical play Madame Butterfly that was based on a short story that was based off a French novel

first performance of Madama Butterfly

• was booed because the audiences wanted something different and perhaps the audience had too high of expectations

• also was originally 2 acts instead of 3 - too long of acts for the audience

beginning of Madama Butterfly

• no formal overture but opera starts with orchestra playing a Japanese theme in a wester style

  • lively, vigorous

  • present throughout the opera

  • set in the style Bach

the Star-Spangled Banner

• follows Pinkerton

• never here the 2 full phrases you heard at the beginning again

• gets shorter each time

• naval anthem at the time Puccini wrote this - not national anthem until 1931

Act I of Madama Butterfly

• Pinkerton has the morals of an alley cat

• maybe Sharpless has a conscience when it comes to Pinkerton and Butterfly marrying

• ends with 16 minute duet

  • 2 melodies converge

  • symbolic lovemaking

  • entirely Puccini’s Italian style - Japanese style is stripped

    • Butterfly losing her nationalism?

  • syncopation: stress in between the pulse of the music

    • represents bodies

Act II of Madama Butterfly

• Pinkerton sings of regret; Sharpless of sympathy; Suzuki of great sadness

• starts in the style of Bach again

  • not energetic this time; slower, more somber

    • her personality is stripped away

• Suzuki maintains Japanese faith - suggests maybe Pinkerton won’t return

• music starts high but comes down - maybe Pinkerton doesn’t come back

  • but maybe he does because the music ends gloriously

• Trouble’s music is very Western - bits of Star Spangled Banner

• humming chorus concludes Act II - symbolizes passage of time

Act III of Madama Butterfly

• fate theme tells us things aren’t going to end well

• dawn music - describes beginning of the day

• Kate knows she’s picking up Trouble and has very little character development

• opera ends with unresolved harmony/chord

  • events are left unresolved

arts in Interpreters of Maladies

photographs, translation, religious art, ancient art, art in a museum, art you travel to see, losing (is there ever a feeling of growth through loss?), cooking, clothing, seduction, knitting, applying makeup, entertaining, conversation, making a home, building a life with someone, building a life in a new country, decorating a home

what’s temporary in A Temporary Matter

• the electricity interruption

• the duration of a candle

• seasons

  • the baby died in September; the story takes place the following March

  • the time period covers the seasonal shift into and out of winter

• beauty

• pregnancy

• love

• life: their son’s; Shukumar’s father’s

• parties

art in Sexy

• Miranda’s mistress clothes

  • trying on a different identity

  • trying to make a dream real?

• tries on a new identity writing the name Mira in the Bengali alphabet

  • the way she writes it is more like drawing than writing

  • a different person in a different language

• photo of Laxmi and her husband on a bench in front of the Taj Mahal

  • a monument to love

  • a souvenir of their trip

  • monuments and souvenirs are to remember

• the Mapparium

  • glowing stained glass

  • maps as art in the Economist and the atlas

  • transcending distance

    • in seeing the globe represented

    • in hearing someone whisper from far aways

• Rohin asks Miranda to draw the room so he can memorize it and asks her to draw his portrait - does he want her to remember him?

  • he draws an airplane - trying to process his dad’s affair?

• religious art of the goddess Kali

  • the god Shiva lays down for her to step on him, helps Kali transcend her rage

  • the Hindu goddess Kali is associated with time, death, and destruction. She also embodies feminine energy, creativity, and fertility

  • connection between art and memory - Miranda remembers the art the most from the Dixit’s home

story structure of Sexy

• the first paragraph is like a short story in miniature. it sets up a parallel between two stories of infidelity

• the last paragraph also sets up a parallel between Miranda and another couple in the story

  • Laxmi and her husband sit on a bench in front of the Taj Mahal

  • story ends with Miranda sitting alone on a bench in front of the First Church of Christ - looks similar to the Taj Mahal

similar dynamics in “Sexy” and Madama Butterfly

• infidelity while your wife is on another continent

• reference pinned butterflies

• couples willing to stay together for their son

• waiting

art in This Blessed House

• a honeymoon souvenir

• his memory of their wedding in India has the quality of art

• Sanjeev’s CDs of classical music

• Twinkle’s clothes, makeup, jewelry, and shoes

  • Twinkle is like a work of art

• the art of the party

• all the Catholic religious art they find (at least 10 pieces)

Twinkle like a goddess or the feminine divine

• her blue face mask is hard (like a statue)

• Kali and Mary are both depicted in the color blue

• could Twinkle and Sanjeev’s dynamic be like the iconography of Kali stepping on Shiva, who has submitted to her?

Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das

• Mr. Kapasi is a lot like Mrs. Das, but not in the way he thinks

  • neither character has a true epiphany, though each seems to realize something

elements in Interpreter of Maladies story

• formality: Mr. and Mrs.

• snacks (also in “Sexy”)

• dreaming

• smells

comparison of Interpreter of Maladies with the Tower of Babel

• God confuses the humans’ language so they can no longer communicate, no longer build a tower that reaches to heaven

  • language barrier as consequence of human pride

  • language shapes reality and governs what we see

  • Mr. Kapasi’s patients can’t communicate with the doctor

• can there ever be a pure science devoid of translation?

• the patient would never know how accurately Mr. Kapasi relays the patient’s experience to the doctor

Interpreter of Maladies and the show Dallas

• Dallas is a show about rich people behaving poorly

  • Americans are presented in a kind of cartoon-ish light

• Bobby is killed off the show, but comes back when it’s revealed that “it was all a dream”

  • parallel to Bobby in the story?

  • relationship between death and reconnecting with the world

Mr. Kapasi’s three fantasies

1. medieval courtly love, she is so high above me, I would never dare to touch her - love at a distance

2. fantasies of exchanging letters - also sort of medieval - love at a distance

3. fantasy involving touch - holding hands

who is the character of interest in “Interpreter of Maladies”?

• Bobby?

  • are the children the characters of interest in the other stories?

• Mr. Kapasi?

what the ruined temple in Interpreter of Maladies conveys

• a disconnection between aesthetic beauty and moral truth

• the outside is surround by wheels- like a car

  • a wish for motion that doesn’t happen in the story

The Third and Final Continent as an immigration story

• double immigration experience

• what is proper and acceptable behavior? customs? clothes?

• soup and cereal and mundane diets

  • Good tea in India and the UK ( first two countries) vs. the way Americans tend to make tea (the 3rd country). They bring Darjeeling tea back from their visits to India

• living life alone

  • also, in London, living communally with other Bengalis, almost without individuation

• aging and inevitability

• getting used to new things

Mrs. Croft and rituals

• consistent commands: liturgical

  • proscribed response of “splendid” is part of the liturgical feel. it is also reminiscent of practicing basic question and answers when learning another language. it also requires the feeling of an inside joke

• the rituals shape time and are in space, but end up violated in one way or another

  • falling off the bench, not leaving the money in the right place, getting used to saying “splendid”

• Mrs. Croft sort of blesses their marriage through her approval of Mara

  • turns the marriage into a real marriage

Mrs. Croft and time travel

• she’s 103 years old

• she was born in 1866, the year after the Civil War. her daughter Helen was born in 1901, the turn of the 20th century.

  • these birth years seem to be chosen intentionally to indicate the end of an era and the turning from one era to another

• Mrs. Croft as a traveler from a continent (an era) that no longer exists, that she cannot go back to, but that you can access in some way while she still lives

Simone de Beauvoir

• youngest to pass “agrégation exam” in philosophy at the Sorbonne (8th woman in history)

• lifelong unmarried non-monogamous partnership with Sartre

• dismissed from teaching in 1941 by Nazis; starts Les Temps Modernes journal with Sartre and others in 1945

• Ethics of Amibiguity (1947) followed by The Second Sex (1949)

• public intellectual; wrote novels, memoirs, essays, travel diaries, philosophy; active in feminist and decolonial movements

• had a conflicted relationship with philosophy

  • she considered herself a writer and liked her novels and memoirs more

• had different views than Sartre; different conclusion

  • didn’t just copy his work

• written off as a feminist writer'

• doesn’t see a homogenous humanity or a moral law, but there is a standard for a good action

  • neither completely Kantian nor completely subjectivist

Beauvoir and the Occupation of Paris in WWII

• her and Sartre were intellectual participants in the first protest of the anti-fascist French Resistance

• when Sartre was imprisoned in 1941, it helped her realize her philosophical ideas of freedom under constraint

existentialism

• existence precedes essence

  • human beings define themselves through their choices and actions; who we are isn’t defined or predetermined by God, nature, or anyone else. We create who we are by engaging with/in the world

• we are condemned to be free

  • as there's no one or no thing defining who we are, we take on the task and responsibility of freedom, which is often not that fun

    • this recognition can cause us anxiety and nausea

free will

capacity to control our actions, including being the source of the action and having the ability to choose otherwise or abstain

existential ethics

• an action is good if it advances fundamental freedom and acknowledges the real living embodied limitations of circumstances

• means and ends both matter

• ethics isn’t a math problem, and empty formula, or the cultivation of propriety. these ethical systems (deontology, consequentialism/utilitarianism, and virtue ethics) are themselves unethical due to their failure to face reality as it really is

good faith

• living and choosing in a way that invokes fairness, sincerity, authenticity, honesty about one’s own biases or limitations

• characterized by respect for another person’s dignity and freedom

• example: using the principle of charity: granting your interlocutor the benefit of the doubt, interpreting their views generously, in the way they probably intended, maximizing truth and plausibility

• people acknowledge their situational limitations

bad faith

• a kind of faux self-deception or disingenuousness

• failure to take responsibility for views or actions

• failure to recognize situational limitations

• failure to treat/view other people with respect as rational human beings

• example: the Requirement from the Loa

the serious world and play

• children explore freedom to imagine and form ethical responsibility/accountability

  • freedom with exuberance but without anxiety

• when you’re a kid, what you do doesn’t really affect the adult world - reality testing?

  • the stakes are far lower than in the adult world

freedom and transcendence

• the foundation of human subjectivity

• the ability to make choices and act as an ethical agent and take responsibility for these choices

• ability to create yourself in the way you want to (disclose being)

• the capacity to transcend one’s external limitations

facticity and immanence

• elements of self and life that one doesn’t choose (ex. nationality, the era and location we were born in, physical constraints of our environments, our historical pasts)

• the serious world that appears, and meaningfully is in certain ways, unchangeable'

  • that’s just the way it is

ethical goodness (for Beauvoir)

consists in taking responsibility for and actualizing freedom for oneself and others, and recognizing the reality of one’s facticity, or the constrains on one’s freedom in the world

willing one’s facticity

• concerns knowing that one is fundamentally free but choosing unfreedom as the motivation for actions

• a kind of bad faith that is a result of leaning passively into external unchosen circumstances

• involves clinging to one’s facticity to avoid the agony of freedom and/or to exploit other people

discovering subjective freedom via intersubjectivity in adolescence

• growing up - child recognizes that they’re free because they see freedom in others

  • at a certain point they figure out how they want to be and how they don’t want to be

  • ex. recognizing ones’ parents’ complacency or hypocrisy; recognizing the injustice of poverty

  • recognize that unethical things are perpetuated by others

• being a good person (acknowledging realities of facticity and freedom to choose how to live) is hard, so we often take solace in simple refusal: the freedom of avoidance, saying “no”

mutual recognition

• condition for free subjectivity

• self-consciousness can be attained “only in another self-consciousness” (Hegel)

• objects in the world can’t recognize our subjectivity, only other people can

• it’s only through interactions with other people that one recognizes they themselves are a subject

• people are means and ends

  • are objects to recognize our subjectivity

  • are subjective themselves

negative freedom

• baseline freedom that everyone has; freedom to say no

• “no” - Hegel calls this “freedom of the void”

• universal, indeterminate, empty of content (abstract)

• freedom from authority or limitations

  • “I” as inwardness

  • you’re not the boss of me

positive freedom

• “yes” - Hegel calls this the “freedom of self-determination”

• using negative freedom to become a person in the world (concrete)

• freedom as universal (“I” a human subject) and specific (“I” an individual)

• freedom to become oneself through specific choices and actions; intersubjective

  • “I am xyz, I do xyz to become who I am”

• you can’t have positive freedom (willing freedom as a particular and determinate project) without negative freedom (fundamental and universal capacity to will freedom)

• only positive freedom is ethical freedom

ambiguity

1. being open to more than one interpretation; having multiple meanings or options

2. uncertain, inexact

• unlike other existentialists, Beauvoir tells us that we must not be paralyzed by these ambiguities and lack of absolutes: we must act amidst them

antinomy

• a real or apparent contradiction between two conclusions, both of which seem justified

• one might be confronted with a choice to use some human beings, deny their transcendence, reduce them to facticity, as a means to pursue the ends of all human beings, or the advancement of transcendence and improvement of facticity for all

2 futures

1. the present and future are continuous

   1. is and will be

   2. present contains future within it

2. the present and future are separate

   1. is vs. will be

   2. future breaks from the present

   3. episodic

   4. present = transitory; future = permanent

   5. leads to blind faith in the future

• no action is conceivable without the premise of the future

• acting in the service of the future isn’t always ethical

pure negativity

“pure” freedom of negation, destruction, absorption, taking in

creative negativity

• “constructive” freedom of negation; the creative metabolization of reality

detotalized totalities

• Beauvoir notes that there’s a temptation to think that our power to create ourselves and the world can be complete, that domination of space and time is in our grasp, but it isn’t

• all categories that function as definitive universal ends (humanity, history, the universe) are detotalized totalities or ongoing evolving processes that we participate in creating into the uncertain future

• we are individual and unpredictable expressions of universal freedom: freedom’s self-realization in real time

  • hence, we must try and fail to act freely

the festival

• a way to stop time from moving forward; acknowledgement of simultaneity of present and future

• explicit celebration of the passage of time

not-so peppy pep-talk at the end of EoA

• action involves inherent failure

• question while we walk- we can think about what’s right and act on it

  • neither pure motion nor pure stasis

  • theory and practice aren’t separate

double-consciousness

• W.E.B DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

• interested in the position of African Americans in the US and the psychological toll of identity after the Reconstruction

• writes in the midst of the failure of Reconstruction

  • black codes: curfews, vagrancy laws, labor contract, women’s rights limits, land restrictions

• aware of being seen by others and caught up with thinking about how others see you in a way you can’t control

The Great Migration

• 6 million black people moved from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states

• 2 waves

• when black soldiers returned from WWI, they expected better; they were treated better in Europe

Red Summer

white people got freaked out by the influx of Black people, leading to race riots across the country (Chicago had the deadliest one with 38 deaths)

Harlem

• originally settled by the Dutch in 1658 and remained farmland for over 200 years

• the African American population grew over 40% between 1910 and 1930 - from 50,000 to over 200,000

Langston Hughes

• born in MO

• dropped out of Columbia, traveled Europe, and enrolled in Lincoln University (HBCU)

• championed black pride, racial consciousness, and workers

• rejects white standards, embraces Black folk culture, and celebrates everyday people

• there’s a relaxed, musical Blues sound in his poems

• wrote “When the Negro was in Vogue,” “Spectacles in Color,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues”

white patronage in Harlem

• many club owners noticed the influx of white people and segregated their clubs

  • the Cotton Club - black people could entertain but not visit the club (mentioned in When the Negro Was in Vogue by Langston Hughes)

• saw the nightlife but never stopped to look at the people living there

• Harlem becomes “fashionable” to white audiences

  • tension between black cultural expression and white consumption and exoticization

  • Hughes thinks Black artists should create authentically, not to please white audiences and rejects pressure to be “respectable” or “acceptable”

Gladys Bentley

dressed in men’s clothes (including a signature tuxedo and top hat), played piano, and sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular tunes of the day in a deep, growling voice while flirting with women in the audience

Claude McKay

• wrote “If We Must Die” and “America”

  • both are sonnets

  • European structure for Black resistance

    • double-consciousness in action

sonnets

• 14 lines

• strict structure - 3 quatrains (4 lines each) and a couplet (2 lines)

• associated with European tradition

• create tension - a problem in the octet

  • then: a shift (volta)

  • resolution in the sestet

If We Must Die

• fear → defiance

• dying → fighting with dignity

America

• simultaneous emotions:

  • hate and love

  • critique and belonging

• sonnet structure doesn’t resolve the tension, it contains it

• iambic pentameter

Heritage

• written by Countee Cullen

  • who believed that there was poetry and black artists, not black poetry but ended up writing black poetry

• trochaic tetrameter

  • stressed unstressed

  • opposite of iambic, the traditional form

    • resisting English form

  • sounds like a drum

  • cuts off one foot and a syllable at the end of each line

    • gives the sense that something’s missing

• italics is a different voice - whose? an inner voice?

  • breaks meter - gets pulled into the beauty of Africa despite protesting message

• is he lying down or lying? or both?

• first voice disappears at the end

  • ends in conflict

Zora Neale Hurston

• wrote “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

• talks about double consciousness and white patronage

  • later felt othered by white people after childhood and leaving her all-black town

• she’s happy to perform - she’s performing in her writing to us

• who’s sophisticated and who’s not?

  • who’s moved by the music?

Charlotte Osgood Mason

• would pay black artists make art, but only the art she wanted

  • stereotypical art, infantilized them

  • primitive is romanticized

• artists had to perform “authenticity,” satisfy white expectations, and maintain artistic integrity

• took legal ownership of some of the works

• made her artists call her “godmother”

Weary Blues

• written by Langston Hughes

• has 12 bar Blues in it but goes back to normal verse at the end

  • he’s won out from fashioning himself how white people want to see him

Nella Larsen

• her immigrant parents settled in a mostly white, working-class neighborhood in Chicago

• she wasn’t named in the census and her school records are spotty

  • her stepfather was a streetcar conductor - a job reserved for white people, and the family had moved to a white neighborhood

  • it’s possible that she was sent to the Erring Women’s Refuge for Reform - a house for unmarried mothers - as a young child

    • her name appears in their records

    • maybe because she couldn’t pass for white

• grew up under Plessy v. Ferguson

• attended Fisk Normal School

  • first time she was surrounded by a Black majority

• later enrolled at the Lincoln School for Nurses

• hired as a superintendent of nurses at the Tuskegee Institute

• married Elmer Imes (the 2nd African American to receive a PhD in physics)

  • later got divorced after she discovered he was seeing a white woman

• volunteered to help prepare the New York Public Library’s first exhibition of American artists and later enrolled in their teaching program and became its first black female graduate

• wrote Quicksand and Passing

  • both have race as a prominent subject and were widely liked

• was accused of plagiarism and never published again, but she did write

• became the first African American woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship

The Rhinelander case

• possible inspiration for Passing

• scandalized New York society in late 1924 and 1925

• Alice Beatrice Jones, the daughter of English working-class immigrants (a cab drive and a maid) secretly married Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, who came from one of the wealthiest families in New York High Society

• the couple dated for 3 years despite objections of Kip’s father, though it’s not clear if his objections were based on her family’s lower social status or disapproval of Alice’s racial background (her father was mixed race)

• On October 14, 1924, the two married in a civil ceremony at New Rochelle city hall and managed to keep the marriage a secret for almost a month before the New Rochelle Standard Star broke the story of what it characterized as a mixed-race marriage, setting off a media frenzy

• Kip originally stood by his wife, but after his family threatened him with disinheritance, he agreed to annul his marriage on the grounds that Alice had hidden her race from him

• the admission that Alice was “colored” (which in Great Britain encompassed people with African, West Indian, South Asian, or Arab ancestry) was key to the defense’s argument, and Alice’s lawyer said anyone could plainly see she wasn’t white

  • how could he not have known

• the UK never formally prohibited interracial marriage nor mandated racial segregation

• the jury ruled that Alice hadn’t concealed her race and denied his request for an annulment

  • he attempted to appeal the ruling several times before finally agreeing to a divorce and to pay Alice alimony for the rest of her life

• Alice put Rhinelander as her last name on her tombstone

Passing Chapter 1

• establishes Irene as narrator and tells us her limitations

  • does she know herself?

• Clare first appears in the novel as a letter, and Irene is overly weird and angry about receiving it

  • the letter is personified

  • sounds like a love letter

    • Irene is intensely drawn to Clare, unable to resist her loveliness and her magnetic powers of persuasion

    • Irene’s affection for Clare is often also a moment of fear and danger

• rooftop: POV

  • man fallen on sidewalk foreshadows the end of the novel

  • beauty - Irene describes Clare before she recognizes her in stereotypically white beauty terms

    • white beauty ideals frame the novel

  • 3rd person limited

    • shows Irene going back and forth in her opinion of Clare

    • she’s very biased

  • Irene admiringly describes Clare one way when she thinks Clare is white, then gets mean when she realizes Clare is passing

• angry description of Clare throughout backstory

• Irene judges Clare for passing as white in her marriage, yet Irene passes as white (sometimes), heterosexual (often, and she might not be, at least not wholly), and happily married (always, but her marriage is in trouble)

  • too judgmental towards Clare?

themes in Passing

• beauty standards - specifically white

• race pride

• frustration with the Color Line in America

• colorism

• belonging, heritage, family

• marriage and heterosexuality expectations

• respectability, upper middle-class propriety, socially conventional behavior

• masquerade, masks, performance

The Drayton Rooftop

• Irene feels intentionally put in categories by white people

• she’s forced to see herself from someone else’s eyes once she realizes they’re staring at her

• Irene’s immediate response to Clare is defensive

• Irene likes Clare’s features

  • she looks at someone’s features to see if there’s racial characteristics - same thing she criticized white people for doing

  • the feature she highlights is Clare’s eyes - racial pride

Tea Scene in Passing

• before Clare’s husband shows up, the women at Clare’s little gathering talk about what it’s like to be married to white men and bear children in a colorist society, one that values lightness over darkness

• Irene feels like an outsider because she’s not married to a white man and doesn’t agree with colorism biases

• Gertrude’s white family doesn’t understand why Gertrude cares about color, but Gertrude knows something they don’t have to know - darker people get fewer opportunities in America

• “nobody wants a dark child”

  • Gertrude takes for granted that her audience agrees with her and Irene is offended

  • she informs both of them that one of her children and her husband are dark and lets it be known that she loves and is producing of them

    • feels comfortable enough to speak up

  • Irene struggles with a sense of not belonging here because she doesn’t share their values

  • when Clare’s husband comes in, though, she feels force to “pass” for white to protect Clare

    • doesn’t feel comfortable enough to speak up because she fears she’ll endanger her friends

    • the situation is so bizarre that Irene can’t stop laughing, but it’s weird laughter and dramatic irony

      • the women have the power of knowledge, but their silence allows his racism to have power

    • the act of passing is destabilizing her identity and sense of self, as well as her core values

Brian doesn’t care for ladies

• Irene also feels like an outsider because her marriage may not be happy, although it’s not clear she realizes what she’s saying

• her husband wants to move to Brazil to escape American racism. Irene is emphasizing that Brian doesn’t like his work, but she also suggests he doesn’t like her, perhaps, and maybe women more generally

• Irene thinks Brian’s blackness is handsome, but her description of him might suggest some anxiety about his sexuality and gender

  • introduces a new standard of beauty than white standards

• Brian is unhappy, which is a big issue in their marriage

• she denies her self-interest in keeping Brian tethered to a life he hates

  • she says it’s for the boys and him, but clearly her control of him stems from her own anxious, even frantic, need for security

• Irene and Brian keep up appearances but aren’t really together

the dance in Passing

• does Irene think of Clare as white when talking about Clare going to the dance

• shows the white tourism that Harlem was becoming famous for, but also the possibilities of unsegregated spaces as sites of freedom

• shows variety and diversity, but also people looking for racial codes and markers rather than just enjoying them

  • Irene wants to enjoy and accept Clare and others; Hugh Wentworth insists on categorizing and fixing people by race

the ending of Passing

• ambiguous

• the final two lines weren’t part of the original ending in the third printing of 1929, though nobody knows why

  • we don’t know if Larsen dropped or supported the dropping of the last two lines, but one scholar supports dropping them, while her biographer supports keeping them

interpretations of Passing

• it might be that each of the conflicts that Irene and Clare face is less about their conflicts with each other and more about the obstacles that a patriarchal, heteronormative society has inflicted upon them

  • we might analyze how Irene and Clare represent two different ways of responding to restrictive gender roles that society places upon women like them

  • we might also see Irene and Clare as potentially occupying roles, like the dancers at the dance, that go beyond gender binaries or heteronormativity

    • possibilities of sisterhood, community, and a love that transcends the claustrophobic world where they find themselves

August Wilson

• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is one of ten plays chronicling 20th century African American life

  • one play for each decade

  • Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is set in the 1920s and is third in the cycle

  • The Pittsburgh Cycle or The Century Cycle

  • all but this play take place in Pittsburgh

  • provides a space where an African American woman has complete control over the white and black men in her sphere

  • asks what happens to Black identity, art, and relationships under systems that exploit them?

    • some survive and make family (Ma, the band)

    • some are broken and turn on others (Levee)

themes in Ma Rainey

• black music in a white recording industry

• Southern fanbase vs. northern financial base

• group participation vs. individual development (blues vs. jazz)

• working with/for white people vs. rising up against them

  • and when these overlap

• double standards/different rules for whites and blacks

• waiting

• language and male banter

• black masculinity as disempowered

• God’s absence

• Ma the Diva, Mother Survivor

• white exploitation and appropriation of black culture

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey

• Mother of the Blues

• bridge between vaudeville and more sophisticated music

• parents performed in minstrel shows

  • she did too, in black face

• started performing with a song and dance troupe at 14

• hear first blues song in 1902 and adapted the style for her own shows

  • made the genre her own

  • claimed to have invented the term blues

• married Will “Pa” Rainey and toured with him

• eventually became a solo act

• bisexual

• called “Paramount Wildcat” because she recorded with Paramount after 25 years off performing

  • released over 100 songs during a six year recording career

  • led to the transformation of Paramount Records from a subsidiary of a furniture company into a major recording label

• when she died, the local paper listed her occupation as a housekeeper

Blues women

• most of the first blues performers were women

• Ma Rainey and other blues women show the dichotomy between the heterosexuality of mainstream popular songs of the 1920s and the blues, which had all kinds of representational freedom

  • provocative sexual imagery in blues lyrics, including homosexual imagery

  • African Americans could now make free decisions about their emotional and sexual lives, the blues reflects this

  • marriage and domesticity are rarely aspirational goals in women’s blues music

• Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were the most widely known

  • they preach about sexual love and, in so doing, articulated a collective experience to freedom, giving voice to the most powerful evidence there was for many Black people that slavery no longer existed