Life As A Firefighter's Wife : April 2010

Hi! Just wanted to post my last English paper for this year. Two down and two to go! Whoo-hoo! It was supposed to be a minimum of five pages so of course I wrote eight. :)

The Twentieth Century:
Making the Change Happen

The twentieth century is a time of dramatic and vast adjustments in society. During this time, people are becoming more aware of each other’s struggles and the formation of human rights is starting. People of color and women alike are beginning to question the system they live under and fight the rules of common society. Many writers, including Virginia Woolf, Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, Jean Rhys and Wole Soyinka, show the slow process of change from modernist to post-modern and the oppressed peoples uprising to equality. Women are oppressed by men and kept from the education they long for until awareness is raised and certain women, such as Virginia Woolf and Aphra Behn, take a stand and begin educating, writing and publishing essays and short stories. Races are oppressed until the middle of the Twentieth century when people of color began to stand up and fight for equality safely by using their writing. Violence also changed drastically during this period as it shifted from violent military wars to a more personal violence against the individual. Both Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen’s poems discuss the affects a violent war has on a person and how they each view it while Seamus Heaney’s poem shows the violence one can inflict upon oneself by the choices they make.

Virginia Woolf, upon asking to speak about “women and fiction” addresses the issue of women’s oppression in 1978 in her essay A Room of One’s Own (2092, 2092-2152). For Woolf, suppression meant that women were blocked from receiving the same education that men received. At the start of her essay she quotes from a sign that she read while walking around a University, “Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here” and in response says “I had no wish to enter had I the right” (2094, 2095).
Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Butler, Pope and many other men’s names are scattered throughout Woolf’s essay for quotes and opinions that men have given about women emphasizing that women aren’t allowed to write or be educated enough to have an opinion that matters. While discussing that men have controlled all the writings about women, Woolf suggests that “Possibly… (they) insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, (they were) concerned not with their inferiority, but with (their) own superiority” (2109). Continuing her research about the oppression of women, Woolf learns the true facts about marriage including that wife-beating was a “recognized right of man” and that marriages were arranged for “family avarice” instead of for love (2113). Carefully, she recognizes that it was society’s general rules that oppresses women and expresses her belief that if women had lived in the sixteenth century and written, their work would be unsigned.
Throughout her essay Woolf acknowledges the main reasons that women aren’t considered equal to men in their writings: space, money and hostility. For a women to have the privacy and time to write is very rare unless her parents are rich or noble. A women’s spending money also depends on a father or husband and is only enough for bare necessities. On the other hand, the few times women had the space, privacy and money to write, they still wouldn’t be able to publish because the world wouldn’t take it seriously (2119). However, Woolf also introduces the start of change and fighting superiority with Aphra Behn stating, “For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen” (2125).

With Harold Pinter’s play The Dumb Waiter, the changes in society became more noticeable as his character’s represent the lower classes who are beginning to question their authority figures. It is also noticed that the oppression shifts slightly to class based from gender based. Pinter’s character Ben is a good example of the common man who does as he’s told by any superior figure, but Gus, Pinter’s second character, begins to question authority as the story unfolds. When he asks Ben about why he stopped the car in the middle of the road on the way to their current location, he is showing a questioning of an authority figure’s actions and choices. Continuing to request information he asks, “Too early for what? You mean someone had to get out before we got in?” (2605).
Ben “kaw(s)” like a parrot through the play, repeating whatever he is told, not questioning authority (2606). Wilson, their boss, calls and tells them what to do and they go over it and carry it out. When Gus talks about Wilson he mentions that “(He) finds him hard to talk to” and that “There are a number of things I want to ask him. But I can never get round to it, when I see him” (2611). Gus describing Wilson in this way expresses his fear of his superior even though he occasionally questions decisions and directions.

In J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians a new side of oppression is shown by those put down for their race or skin color. While waiting for the barbarians, people gather in the streets and the author, feeling guilty, thinks, “I ought to go back to my cell. As a gesture it will have no effect, it will not even be noticed” (2840). As sad as it is, he was right that one person turning away from a horrendous act wouldn’t turn crowds away also because oppression goes mostly unnoticed by those inducing it. In the process of beating the barbarians, the Colonel rubs a handful of dirt into their backs and uses a stick of charcoal to write “ENEMY” on every one of them (2841). Labeling the barbarians this way and then beating the name off of them is symbolic of stripping them of everything they are.

When the author does raise the courage to attempt to speak up against the violence he is fearful and cautious sputtering, “ ‘No!’ I hear the first word from my throat, rusty, not loud enough. Then again: ‘No!’ This time the word rings like a bell from my chest” (2842). The author being unable to explain his emotion is a symbol for how hard it is to stand up to the government, or oppressive, system. This type of violence to a group based on who they are is past logic, reason or understanding. Waiting for the Barbarians is a good example of how a group of people can become barbaric for oppressing others raising a question about who the true monster is.

The Day They Burned the Books by Jean Rhys is a short story about a little girl
growing up in the Lesser Antilles and her life in oppression because of her skin color. Racism is used to keep the native people in oppression as the superiors wouldn’t allow them to feel comfortable. When confronted about her skin color the author responds, “Well, I don’t much want to be English…It’s much more fun to be French or Spanish or something like that – and, as a matter of fact, I am a bit” (2359).

The author feels torn between her native home and the home in which the educational books she reads comes from because of her friend. She describes his features and coloring along with his personality, “Eddie with the pale blue eyes and straw-coloured hair – the living image of his father, though often as silent as his mother – who first infected me with doubts about ‘home’, meaning England” (2358). The English were seen as superior and their books were published and read though-out the islands instead of the natives books. When the author talks about the Eddie, of English decent, she mentions the appearance of him as almost perfect: “he never felt the heat; some coldness in his fair skin resisted it. He didn’t burn red or brown, he didn’t freckle much” (2359). Though Eddie is seen as English, he states that he doesn’t like strawberries or daffodils showing that he doesn’t listen to the propaganda that England is better than the islands.

The book burning by Mrs. Sawyer symbolized the colonization of the islands by the English and how the native people felt about it. Specifically, Mrs. Sawyer burns a book by Christina Rossetti, a symbol for all women writers who have been published, representing that it was worse to join the oppressor than be oppressed. To show the authors own mixed feelings about the islands and England she uses hybridity of her native tongue with English.

The last symbol in the story is the book that she grabs when running from the house, “Fort Comme La Mori” meaning strong as death in French. It is symbolic of the strength needed to overcome oppression and the authority figures keeping her and her people there. Taking the book is a small way of fighting back the society’s rules.

Wole Soyinka, author of Telephone Conversation, also writes about oppression by racism in the twentieth century by describing his hunt for a place to live in England and his difficulty finding one. He discusses the price being right and notes that the location of the building doesn’t matter. Soyinka feels the need for “self-confession” which is ironic because he has no control over his skin color, therefore no reason to need to confess anything. Continuing on though, he warns the landlady, “Madam, I hate a wasted journey – I am African” (4-5). He tells us his image of her; a snooty, well-bred women smoking a cigarette with lipstick-lined lips. She asks him “How dark? Are you light or very dark?” (10-11).

Soyinka next describes the smell of the callbox symbolizing the smell of society and how they everything stay that way instead of working to fix it. He mentions seeing red everywhere, “Red booth. Red pillar-box. Red double-tiered Omnibus” are all symbols that imperialism is everywhere (2530). Questioning him further the landlady asks him to compare his skin color to the familiar object of milk, plain or chocolate. He responds that he is many colors including “brunette”, “peroxide blonde”, and “raven black” suggesting that she just see for herself before judging him. Offering that she takes a look at him instead of simply deciding over the phone suggests that she get to know him instead of judging him and refusing him a room based on his skin color.

By pushing that option, Soyinka brings to light a new way for people to live free of oppression. Progress has been made from Woolf’s time of just writing about having people push certain classes or colors or groups of people around, to actually speaking up about it. Woolf’s essay explains the reasons why women are oppressed, by extension races, and now that those reasons are written and known people can begin acting and fighting back against begin put down.

Robert Graves’ poem Recalling War begins looking back on World War I from the point of view of the soldiers still alive who have been injured. Graves first gives the reader a sense that the soldiers are better off for serving in the war when he states that those with prosthetic limbs forget about them and that “The blinded man sees with his ears and hands / as much or more than once with both his eyes” (5-6). The tone shifts slightly when he mentions the “healthy dying” which was common in war when soldiers were accidentally shot, but preceding that talks of how “Death was young” which is something that shouldn’t be normal but is happening (19, 18). Following up to ferment the youth of those fighting, Graves adds that the soldiers are like “child(ren)” with “toy-like” guns (40, 42). When he specifically discusses war, Graves is negative, stating that it is “an infection of the common sky” and the “return of earth to ugly earth” where “Down in a row the brave tin-solders fall” (12, 31, 43). Wilfred Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est clearly complies with “Recalling War” when describing the soldiers by saying that “All went lame; all blind; / Drunk with fatigue” and also referring to them as “children” (6-7, 26). Visual and auditory imagery aid the reader to fully understand the violence of the war going on around them. Owen graphically describes a scene in which tear gas has been dropped around him and his fellow soldiers saying that there was “An ecstasy of fumbling” while everyone put on their masks and helmets but “someone still was yelling out and stumbling, / And flound’ring like a man in fire” (9, 11-12). The violence continues as Owen watches the man slowly “drown” in the gas until “He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning”, dying a very painful death (14, 16). That soldier continues to haunt Owen in his dreams and he wishes that the reader “could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in, / And watch the white eyes writhing in his face” (17-19). Lastly, Owen mentions that “Dulce et decorum est” is an “old Lie” that it is not nice to die for one’s country (27).

The opposite of the violence in and against war poems is the violence in and against individuals. Seamus Heaney’s poem Punishment describes a young girl who is malnourished and about to be drowned because of adultery. This particular poem shows a violence unlike any other violence written about in society; violence against an individual for ritualistic purposes. Like Owen’s poem, visual imagery is used so that the reader better understands the girl’s situation. For example, “the wind…blows her nipples to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs” showing that she is cold, starved and naked but he doesn’t stop there, he continues to detail her death in the bog by mentioning small things like “The weighing stone, / the floating rods and boughs” (3-8, 11-12). Almost feeling sympathy for “her shaved head / like a stubble of black corn” Heaney recalls that he “would have cast…the stones of silence” also if he was in her society (17-18, 30-31). Recognizing that the “poor scapegoat” isn’t the only one who participated in the adulterous acts she is being convicted of, Heaney stands in “civilized outrage yet understand(s) the exact and tribal, intimate revenge” because he understands that as a product of a society that accepts ritualized violence but also knows he can’t stop it (28, 42-44).

The Twentieth century was a time of great change in which oppression majorly ceased to exist as awareness was raised with the written word by authors who have experienced it firsthand and the war in society changed from universal to individual. People are no longer oppressed by their race or gender and violence has shifted from military to the individual in a ritualistic manner.

Thanks for reading! I know it was intimidating. :)See y'all in 24 days at the wedding!