Things Fall Apart

As a story about a culture on the verge of change, Things Fall Apart deals with how the prospect and reality of change affect various characters. The tension about whether change should be privileged over tradition often involves questions of personal status. Okonkwo, for example, resists the new political and religious orders because he feels that they are not manly and that he himself will not be manly if he consents to join or even tolerate them. Okonkwo’s relationship with his late father shapes much of his violent and ambitious demeanor. . Since early childhood, Okonkwo’s embarrassment about his lazy, squandering, and effeminate father, Unoka, has driven him to succeed. To some extent, Okonkwo’s resistance of cultural change is also due to his fear of losing societal status. His sense of self-worth is dependent upon the traditional standards by which society judges him. This system of evaluating the self inspires many of the clan’s outcasts to embrace Christianity. Long scorned, these outcasts find in the Christian value system a refuge from the Igbo cultural values that place them below everyone else. In their new community, these converts enjoy a more elevated status. The villagers in general are caught between resisting and embracing change and they face the dilemma of trying to determine how best to adapt to the reality of change. Many of the villagers are excited about the new opportunities and techniques that the missionaries bring. This European influence, however, threatens to extinguish the need for the mastery of traditional methods of farming, harvesting, building, and cooking

Things Fall Apart

                                   

         Things Fall Apart

 Okonkwo is one of the wealthy and respected warriors of the Umuofia clan. He is driven by his hatred of his father, Unoka, and his fear of becoming like him. Okonkwo associates Unoka with weakness, and with weakness he associates femininity. Although Okonkwo 's father was a lazy man who received no titles in his village and died with huge debts, Okonkwo brought honor to his village by beating Amalinze the Cat in a wrestling contest. Until his match with Okonkwo, the Cat had been undefeated for seven years. The practice of sharing palm-wine and kola nuts is repeated throughout the book to emphasize the peacefulness of the Igbo. When Unoka’s resentful neighbor visits him to collect a debt, the neighbor does not immediately address the debt. Instead, he and Unoka share a kola nut and pray to their ancestral spirits. Okonkwo is selected by the elders to be the guardian of Ikemefuna, a boy taken prisoner by the village as a peace settlement between two villages after his father killed an Umofian woman. Ikemefuna is homesick and scared at first, but Nwoye’s mother treats him as one of her own, and he is immediately popular with Okonkwo’s children. During the Week of Peace, Okonkwo notices that his youngest wife, Ojiugo, has left her hut to have her hair braided without having cooked dinner. He beats her for her negligence, shamefully breaking the peace of the sacred. Wife-beating is an accepted practice. Moreover, femininity is associated with weakness while masculinity is associated with strength. It is no coincidence that the word that refers to a titleless man also means “woman”.  A man is not believed to be “manly” if he cannot control his women. Okonkwo frequently beats his wives, and the only emotion he allows himself to display is anger.

      

Characterization of Mrs. Newell

Characterization of Mrs. Newell

Mrs. Sam Newell can be categorized as a person whose social status comes right at the top of her priority list. To maintain her social life and her finance, she could go to the extent of commodifying her daughter as well. She commodifes her daughter by marrying her daughter Hermoine  to a wealthy man so that it would help her maintain her financial as well as social status.

Rewrites of Paper 1           

        In the essay “everyday use” the author Alice Walker speaks of a relationship between a mother and her two daughters, Maggie and Dee. The mother narrates her story by introducing Maggie and her personality stating that Maggie was shy by nature, homely and was ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs due to the house fire. She lacks confidence and shuffles when she walks. Whereas Dee is Mama’s older daughter and is an educated woman. Dee is very aggressive by nature and does not have any respect for people either younger or elder than her

       Basic concepts in the psychoanalytical theory that are common in “Everyday Use” include the defenses, and core issues. A few of the defenses Dee uses include low self-esteem, denial and avoidance. Maggie has a core issue which is self esteem .I feel that she is going through this psychological problem because of the burn scars down on her arms and legs. Maggie’s low self esteem is evidence in her body language when the narrator claims “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burned scars down her arms and legs ,eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her” (Walker).

 Dee was in denial that she ever came from a poor family. By keeping her upper-class lifestyle and never visiting her home, she could completely avoid remembering where she came from. By avoiding her home she can make a new image for herself and suppress her family and her past. To do this, Dee becomes obsessed with her image. By denying her past and by avoiding reminders of her past, Dee forms a psychological wound when the narrator claims “She wrote to me once that no matter where we “choose” to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her friends” (Walker).

Insecure or unstable sense of self is another core issues that Dee has hidden deep in her id. Dee is insecure and has an unstable sense of self. She isn’t completely sure who she is. She came from a poor, low-class, African-American family, but she was able to get a college degree. Is she still a part of her poor family? Or is she now in the middle-class? Because she is dangling between her old and new lives, she isn’t sure who she is.  “Our sense of self is insecure or unstable…this core issue makes us very vulnerable to the influence –for good or ill –of other people, and we may have the tendency to repeatedly change the we look(our clothing ,hairstyle, and the like )or behave as we become involved with different individuals or groups”(Walker).Dee changed the way she dressed because she is embarrassed of how she grew up in her family and changed  her name from “Dee” to “Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo “ to protest being named after people who have oppressed her.

   Everyday Use

         

                  In the story “Everyday use” the author Alice Walker speaks of a relationship between a mother and her two daughters, Maggie and Dee. The mother narrates her story by introducing Maggie and her personality stating that Maggie was shy by nature, homely and was ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs due to the house fire. She lacks confidence and shuffles when she walks. Whereas Dee is Mama’s older daughter and is an educated woman. She is very aggressive by nature and does not have any respect for people either younger or elder than her.

    

              American dream, Competition and Commodification are three aspects of the Marxist theory that can be evidenced in “Everyday Use”. According to Lois Tyson, the American dream can be defined as: “a capitalist ideology associated specifically with American history and culture” (59).Dee considers her as a part of the American dream because she was born in a poor family but she went to college with the help of her community and made something of herself. Her standard of living was much better compared to her past. The second aspect that can be evidenced in Dee is competition .She was a smart girl from the very beginning as a young girl and was always comparing herself with that of other people. It can be witnessed that Dee competes with Maggie for the quilt made by her grandma when she says “Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they’d be in rags. Less than that!”(Dee).The last aspect that can be found was Commodification.We can say that Dee is viewing the quilts in terms of their social status when she says “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts !She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.”She wants to show them off to her friends while Maggie will simply use them as she would any other quilt.