The Joy of Cooking

When I got done reading Elaine Magarrell's poem The Joy of Cooking, I wasn't really sure what had just happened.  What a gory image!  I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that the speaker of this poem isn't very fond of her siblings.  However, as grotesque as the culinary plotting of family organs was, I feel like the particular body parts the speaker chose were symbolic.  The tongue was used to characterize her sister.  The fact that she chose the tongue of all body parts leads me to believe that her sister had a smart mouth, or just often said things the narrator didn't want to hear.  But when she says "it will probably grow back" (Magarrell, handout), it makes it seem as though her sister's tongue can only be subdued for a short period of time before she continues her apparently unpleasant banter.  She says that her brother's heart needs lots of frilly trimmings to "make it interesting at all" (Magarrell, handout).  Is her brother so heartless that he might as well not have a heart at all?  Perhaps, in order to 'eat' his heart, it would need all of those extra seasonings because he has no love of anything in his life.  The narrator seems very bitter towards both of her siblings.  Perhaps she wants one to STOP talking and one to START feeling something within him.

Edward

Edward is a poem that I don't really care for.  I think the author used the repetition of the phrases "Edward, Edward" and "Mother, Mother" to show the apparent intimacy and intensity of the mother-son relationship within the poem.  Edward tried to lie first that he had "killed [his] hawk" (anonymous, 977) and his horse, and that his mother soon called his bluff.  I don't understand why he had killed his father?  I feel like this Edward cares little for anyone but himself.  The biggest indicator of this is the fact that he apparently slaughtered his father at knife-point.  He can't have done it for the riches.  From the rest of the poem, it sounds like he had towers and halls and wealth at his fingertips.  But he wasn't going to stay to take care of these things and take responsibility for his actions.  He was planning on being a coward and sailing away across the sea.  How could he be so callous about his wife and children??  He went so far as to suggest that the world was large enough for them to just beg on the streets and survive.  He was so willing to abandon all that he should have been living to protect.

The Drunkard

In this entry I would like to discuss the differences between the father's reaction and the mother's reaction to their son being drunk.  I was disgusted by the father's behavior throughout the entire short story.  When his son, his very young son, was bent over puking, he barely attempted to comfort him.  He was more worried about getting his fancy funeral suit dirty than the fact that his son was clearly in agony.  He viewed his son and their walk home together as an embarrassment.  I don't think he ever stopped to realize that what he was seeing was a mirror image of himself when HE was intoxicated.  All he could think about was getting his swooning son home before the whole street could get the idea that he was a bad father.  And even in the end, he was only bitter about the fact that Larry had taken all of his beer.
Larry's mother was furious with the father at the fact that he had allowed their boy to become drunk.  However, in the privacy of being alone with Larry, it became obvious that she couldn't have been more grateful that he had done so.  "You brave little man...you were his guardian angel" (O'Connor, 351).  She realized that it was because of her innocent son that her alcoholic husband hadn't come home dangerously intoxicated.

A Worn Path

In Eudora Welty's A Worn Path, she uses a great amount of characterization to give us a clear image of Phoenix.  She mentions right off the bat that the old woman has a difficult time moving, as well as seeing.  Welty litters the short story with implications that Phoenix isn't completely sane in her old age.  She talks to inanimate objects more than she does humans; she argues, agrees, and converses with everything she sees.  While this is a little endearing, it also goes to show the reader that, if not slightly crazy, Phoenix is at the very least a rather lonely woman.  At one point, she thought she saw a little boy handing her cake, "but when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air" (Welty, 224).  Welty wants us as the readers to fully understand that Phoenix is a little crazy.  However, this characterization of an old, hallucinating, forgetful woman, just contributes all the more to the theme of the story. 
Whether her grandson is dead or alive, it is obvious that Phoenix has unconditional love for him.  She couldn't remember why she was going to town, she couldn't see where she was going, but none of that mattered.  It was instinct: she HAD to get the medicine.  She HAD to take care of her grand baby, even if that meant taking day-long, dangerous journeys in order to get it.

Once Upon a Nightmare

From beginning to end, I was slightly disturbed by Nadine Gordimer's short story Once Upon a Time.  To me, the entire story was constantly dripping with paranoia.  Every action of the parents of the story was to try and protect themselves and their son from dangerous criminals.  "There were many burglaries in the suburb" (Gordimer, 233), and this made everyone uneasy.  It was ironic that, the more preventive measures the families in the area took, the more the crime rate went up.  All of their obnoxious and useless alarms just made enough noise to cover up the sounds of one's house being robbed!
The more Gordimer repeated the phrase that the family was living "happily ever after", the more they clearly were NOT!  They just kept building up more and more walls and security systems around them, until they eventually became prisoners of their own home!  They had taken all the precautions, such as signs, fences, and walls, to warn those on the outside not to harm them.  They never did, however, warn their SON about everything their yard possessed.  They didn't want to ruin his precious fairytale by advising caution about the deadly coils along their fence.  He had never been warned, as the rest of the world had.  He was the one thing the parents had been trying to protect, and he was the one thing that ultimately ended up being taken away from them.

dried up grape: 5

Mama was at odds with her children so often throughout Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun because of the generation gap between them.  Mama just could not wrap her head around Walter and Beneatha's reasonings for the things they did.  She had lived in a simpler time, where families were hard-working and God-fearing.  I could feel how much it broke her heart throughout the play as she realized more and more how far her children had strayed from what they had been taught.  The respect difference of the gap shows when Mama is  passionately arguing with Beneatha about how she speaks of God.  "It don't sound nice for a young girl to say things like that..." (Hansberry, 457).  Mama is constantly arguing with Walter about their financial situation and how one should view and value money.  It really hits Mama how different her world is from her children when Walter makes the claim that money is life.  "Once upon a time freedom used to be life--now it's money.  I gues the world really do change..." (Hansberry, 475).  What I thought was strange though, was that there was an even larger gap in age between Mama and Travis, yet those two got along better than anyone else in the play!  They both had simpler, more innocent minds.

dried up grape: 4

I didn't really care for either of Mama's children.  I found Walter to be condescending and delusional, and Beneatha to be inconsiderate and self-absorbed. 
Walter was a man consumed by his own bitterness and dashed dreams.  I felt like I was reading about a crazy person when Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun described the scene of Walter actually believing for a while that he was a tribal leader in an African jungle.  Only once or twice did he mention the actual death of his father.  All he could think about was how to convince Mama to let him take it all to fulfill HIS dreams.  "Here I am a giant--surrounded by ants!  Ants who can't even understand what it is the giant is talking about" (Hansberry, 484).  He thinks that no one understands him, when he hasn't tried to understand anyone else's ideas as to what to do with the money.  I was disgusted when he betrayed Mama and used all of the money for his failure of an investment, instead of using a portion of it to help pay for his sister's education.
Beneatha is just as crazy in her own way.  She never seemed to be satisfied, always lecturing someone about the way he or she was choosing to live.  She had wasted much needed money on frivalous items such as guitar lessons, horseback riding, etc.  Beneatha overall just made every situation and conversation more dramatic than it needed to be.

dried up grape: 3

I felt that, in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth is the biggest round character.  At the beginning of the play, she is irritable, grumpy, difficult, and overall just unpleasant.  When her husband "reaches for her" on the first morning of the play, "she crosses away" (Hansberry, 438).  She did not give her husband the time of day, and wasn't always very nice to Travis and Beneatha.  When Ruth first discovered that she was pregnant, she is absolutely devastated and "collapses into a fit of heavy sobbing" (Hansberry, 464).  I felt sick to my stomach when it was revealed that she had already made a downpayment to abort her unborn child.  She went through such a transformation though!  Where the prospect of abortion was out of desparation, the promising future with more money and a new home changed Ruth.  She was HAPPY for once.  She started mending her relationship with Walter, and never mentioned anything else about killing her baby.  Ruth went from being willing to murder her child, to having a new, positive and hopeful outlook on life.

dried up grape: 2

My absolute favorite character throughout all of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun was Mama.  She never once lost her temper, even though she had every reason to.  If I'd have lived in that cramped apartment with a delusional son, a self-absorbed daughter, a grumpy pregnant daughter-in-law, and a rowdy grandson, I would surely go crazy.  She was so strong in her faith.  Nothing that her family did or said to her ever made her waiver in her faith, just made her cling to God all the more.  Hansburry uses direct characterization for Mama from the very start.  In the first description of Mama, she mentioned that Mama's "bearing is perhaps most like the noble bearing of the women of the Hereros of Southwest Africa..." (Hansburry, 448).  She shows right away that Mama is a proud, strong woman.  Mama was really the only character who consistently showed love and affection for Travis.  Ruth, Walter, and Beneatha were always teasing him, yelling at him, or telling him to go away so that the adults could talk.  Mama adored her grandson, and made sure he knew it.

dried up grape: 1

The setting in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun greatly impacts the characters and the overall story line of the play.  For Walter Young, he was constantly surrounded by shame.  Everywhere he looked in their apartment, whether it be at the shabby walls, the trails of cockroaches, or his son's temporary bed on the couch, he only saw his failures.  In his mind, he felt he had failed to provide a decent life for his family.  Even the little objects of the house, such as food, would set Walter into a rage.  "DAMN MY EGGS -- DAMN ALL THE EGGS THAT EVER WAS" (Hansberry, 443)!  I think the eggs were symbolic to Walter.  The measly food symbolized, in Walter's mind, all of his failures.  He fantasized about living in a mansion with servants and extravagant food for every meal.  But, when his wife served him eggs in their dump of a dwelling, he exploded in frustration.
To Mama, the house represented all that she and her husband had worked for.  She was so attached to the apartment that she didn't even seem to ever be bothered by how run-down it was.