Lit Literature

In A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, the main focus tends to be on the characters Stanley and Blanche, and not much gets said about Stella. Today, I want to discuss Stella’s character since she’s so underappreciated in most analyses. Photo found at https://www.pinterest.com/pin/475059460667263213 Stella is the wife of Stanley and the sister of Blanche .   I’ll give you a quick recap of her backstory.   Stella grew up on a plantation and was raised, along with her sister, to be very proper and refined young ladies. She moved away from home to New Orleans and married Stanley. Now she is pregnant and her sister has to come to stay with her and her husband because she lost the family plantation after all their relatives died.   Now that you’re up to speed, let's focus more on Stella now that her sister is staying with her. From the start of the play, Stella was caught in the middle of her husband and her sister. Both Stanley and Blanche were ...

Let’s clear the air now by saying that "Portrait in Georgia" by Jean Toomer, is my favorite poem that I’ve ever read. This poem is incredibly complex with its imagery comprised in similes and character building which only makes it more interesting to compare interpretations of the piece. It’s describing the image of a white woman by comparing her features to a lynched black man’s corpse. As creepy as that sounds, it’s quite beautiful, thought-provoking work. For this post, I only want to discuss a single interpretation of and first two lines of the poem. Toomer starts by describing the woman’s hair as “braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope” (lines one and two).   This produces two simultaneous images of braided hair and a rope.   One of my classmates pointed out that this could be a symbol of how many black men were killed just for liking a white woman because Toomer’s choice to compare the woman’s hair to a lyncher’s rope is conveying that white women were a ...

Well, I guess not all Modernist poets, but the females like Millay or Loy certainly were.   I’m not saying that they didn’t believe in God or anything, but they didn’t promote Christian values as regards to marriage, intercourse, or gender roles.               In poems like "I Being Born A Woman and Distressed" (1892-1950) by Millay or "Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots" (1914) by Loy, women of the times were not shy about discussing the traditional gender roles that pertain to women being lesser than men.   They both cry out to their readers that women are equal to men and that they should be allowed to make their own choices sexually.   The problem with this notion is that it’s going against what scripture teaches about sexuality and gender. Photo from https://www.barraques.cat/viwall/ihxhRoR_free-download-christian-brides-grooms-wedding-couple-christian/        ...