Hurston & Wright // Julia Spangler

How does Hurston challenge the conventional ways African Americans are portrayed in literature?

In the secondary source “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Zora Neale Hurston laments the lack of emotionally complex minority characters, particularly African Americans, in literature. She argues that the absence of relatable African American characters plays a role in maintaining the tension between races, since people are prone to dislike that which they do not understand. The average white reader would never relate to a simplified, stereotyped black character “picking away on his banjo and singing and laughing,” which reinforces the reader’s belief that individuals of other races lack emotional depth (1606). Hurston wants publishers and readers to realize that minorities “can and do experience discovery of the numerous subtle faces as a foundation for a great and selfless love, and the diverse nuances that go to destroy that love as with others” (1606). Is she successful in achieving this in her own work?

I believe Hurston was successful. Delia, the main character of Sweat, leads a simple, repetitive existence but has a complex interior life. First of all, she carries the burden of a loveless, abusive marriage. Delia has experienced disillusionment as profoundly as any white Hemingway protagonist. Second, she possesses a certain power, since she is the breadwinner in her family and owns their house. While the narrator says that Delia had previously been quiet and shy, in this story Delia realizes her own power and stands up to her husband. But even this change isn’t a flat, 180-degree flip: while refusing to be dominated by Sykes anymore, she still “attempt[s] a timid friendliness” (568 ). Delia is at once strong, timid, fed-up, devout, and somewhat murderous, a far cry from the banjo-picking and “intellectual” African American stereotypes Hurston mentions in her essay. Hurston successfully gives readers the kind of minority character that helps build bridges between races instead of widening the gap.

What biographical overtones are evident in The Man Who Was Almost a Man? How was Wright’s adolescence similar to Dave’s, and are these similarities significant?

In “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Dave Saunders experiences a coming-of-age struggle. After sneaking off to work with his two-dollar gun, Dave accidentally shoots a mule belonging to his employer, Jim Hawkins. Though he avoids serious punishment, he will have to work for two years to pay off the price of the mule. To Dave, this situation is unbearable, since everyone he knows thinks of him as a boy (especially after the mule incident), and he is certain that he is a man. Fueled by anger at their patronizing attitude (“something hot seemed to turn over inside him each time he remembered how they had laughed”), Dave impetuously hops onto a passing train with nothing but the empty gun in his pocket (1375).

Dave’s directionless flight bears a striking resemblance to the author’s own life. In “Reading Fiction,” Richard Wright describes his own desire to flee from the southern life of his adolescence: “I was now running more away from something than toward something. But that did not matter to me. My mood was: I’ve got to get away; I can’t stay here” (1570). He too clung to a symbol that to him represented the manhood and freedom he craved. Dave’s symbol was the gun, and Wright’s was books. Just as Dave placed all his hopes and dreams on the idea of a gun without caring about its type or quality, Wright acknowledges that his “belief in books had risen more out of a sense of desperation than from any abiding conviction of their ultimate value” (1571).

The similarities between Wright’s own experience and Dave’s story are too obvious to ignore. But what significance might they have to a reading of the story? After reading Wright’s essay, I think he might have intended to make Dave more sympathetic than he initially comes off. While reading the story, I thought of Dave as kind of a stupid kid who doesn’t know what he wants and who only cares about himself. However, if Wright himself was much like Dave in his youth, he surely didn’t intend to skewer Dave’s confusion. Wright testifies that, despite his harsh upbringing, “it had never occurred to [him] that [he] was in any way an inferior being” (1572). Perhaps this story is part of Dave’s journey to discovering the self-worth that Wright had intrinsically felt.

How do both stories make use of local language?

Both Sweat and The Man Who Was Almost a Man utilize the distinctive language of the southern United States, almost to an indecipherable degree. “Ahm ol enough o hava gun,” Dave says to himself (1367). “You knows how skeered Ah is of snakes,” Delia tells Sykes (564). It takes the reader a while to get accustomed to the different spellings and pronunciations of words, but the language is necessary to create the appropriate setting and tone for each story. The contrast between the colloquial dialogue and the academically correct narration, Charters mentions in the introduction to Wright’s story, highlights the differences between the lives of the white and black characters, as well as between black characters and white readers. Flannery O’Connor, in “Writing Short Stories,” advises a group of Southern writers not to avoid the use of local language and mannerisms. According to O’Connor “an idiom characterizes a society, and when you ignore the idiom, you are very likely ignoring the whole social fabric that could make a meaningful character” (1624). The social context of today’s two stories is vital to their understanding, and both authors successfully place their characters in authentic environments via their speech patterns. How much less would we know about Dave Saunders if his dialogue and inner thoughts had been written in standard English? Would Delia’s exasperation with Sykes have rung as true if it had been grammatically correct? While the unconventional spelling makes reading a little more difficult, I think it is necessary for conveying the setting and characterization of these stories.

Gertrude Stein& Sherwood Anderson

 

February 8^th, 2009

Short Story

Dr. Drake

Xiaofeng Zhu

                           Gertrude Stein& Sherwood Anderson

1. Will you get confused by Stein’s Miss Furr and Miss Skeene?

Actually, I was driven mad by it. Perhaps, I did not make sense at all of her work. In Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, one of the most apparent features is that Stein used repetition in her work. Not only once or several times, but all the times. She used repetition over and over, which made me confused for a while. For example, in the first paragraph, when she introduced Helen Furr’s family” Mrs. Furr was quite a pleasant woman. Mr. Furr was quite a pleasant man”(1198), and in nest page, she repeated this description again “Mrs. Furr was a pleasant enough woman, Mr. Furr was a pleasant enough man”(1199). I was wondering why she repeated her words again. This is only one simplest quotation from that work. In this work, a lot of words repeats again and again. For instance, “gay, voice, travelling, cultivated, regularly, dark”, those words almost occur in every sentence, which made me mad. “To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They ere regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay”(1198), which reads like a poem that is full of rhythm. There are numerous paragraphs that expressing the same meaning, containing repeated words over and over. In Stein’s essay” How Writing is Written”, the author also stated that“ The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing as repetition”(494). Then she illustrated some easily understandable examples to support her thesis. Gradually, she said “There has to be a very slight change”, as I took for example before. “That change, to me, was a very important thing to find out. You will see that when I kept on saying something was something or somebody was somebody, I changed it just a little bit but until I got a whole portrait”, which is also proofed in her work.

2. what’s the symbol of “hands” in Hands?

In this work, the author—Anderson mentioned many times of “hands”. They are the hands of the main character—Wing Biddlebaum’s. In the first paragraph, Anderson described the setting of the story and introduced the main character—Wing Biddlebaum who was a miserable image. “Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years. Among all the people of Winesburg but one had come close to him”(38), which reveals his loneliness and misery. The author stated “ Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands…forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back”(38,39), which reveals Wing’s ambivalent mind. On one hand, he wants to express something as he likes. On the other hand, he is afraid to do that because something he says will cause him trouble. Thus, he tries to hide them. In the nest paragraphs, the author explained the reason why he has this kind of ambivalent characteristics. Because of his hands, he caused much trouble in the past. Therefore, he now tries to hide them to avoid troubles. In my opinion, “hands” exist in us every man. They are like something we have but meanwhile they cause us much trouble. Then, everyone tries to hide them to avoid trouble. However, the more you want to hide them, the obvious they become.

 

 

Q&Q: Stein and Anderson

Can you take Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Fur and Miss Skeene” seriously?

I cannot take this short story seriously. I found myself laughing a few paragraphs into it, and not because I was enjoying it. It was utterly bizarre to me. I felt as if I was reading a book written by Dr. Seuss. While adults can certainly enjoy Dr. Seuss’ work, I did not expect or want to receive that sort of feeling from a short story meant for adults.

As for a possible connection to cubism, an art movement which covers a subject from many different angles, I do not see it. Stein uses very similar sentences to convey the same message, but these sentences are so similar that she might as well have just used one. Her act of droning on does not create a cubist tone, because rather than fully covering a whole subject, it overdoes the description of one small part of a subject.

I fail to see how the process of adding three pages of text to a story that could have been one page adds depth to a story. I feel that it does just the opposite. The repetition makes the writing nearly incomprehensible. The reader can’t take anything substantial away from it . . . that is, if the reader is patient enough to even attempt to. Stein’s writing makes it very easy for readers to become so fed up that they give up altogether.

In the second paragraph, it is stated five times within four sentences that the women “[a]re gay there” (1198). This is overkill, plain and simple. Who wants to read an entire short story made up of this? I certainly don’t.

Stein’s writing style only serves to confuse me and make me lose sight of what the meaning or point of the story was in the first place. Actually, it seems that there might not even have been a story to begin with, only a plethora of silly and repetitive descriptions. Stein’s experimentation takes what could have been a succinct, meaningful story and turns it into a circus act. The story’s memorable, for sure, but only because of the self-importance it exudes.

Even if this style of writing became mainstream, I doubt I would be able to take anything away from “Miss Fur and Miss Skeene.” The tactics Stein uses in this story go far beyond what is necessary; they place the tale in an almost otherworldly realm.

 

Sherwood Anderson says of Gertrude Stein’s work, “Here [i]s something purely experimental and dealing in words separated from sense — in the ordinary meaning of the word sense — an approach I [am] sure the poets must often be compelled to make” (1406). Does Anderson succeed in taking this approach with “Hands”?

As far as I’m concerned, Anderson’s work (happily) bears no resemblance to Stein’s. What makes “Hands” readable and enjoyable is the fact that it is written normally, so to speak. While Anderson might place more focus on details and scenery than other writers do, there’s still a point to all of it, and it is written gracefully.

There is no separation from our language in Anderson’s writing. His style is more concentrated than most writers’, but it remains eloquent and understandable. The words he utilizes retain the “sense” that is typically attached to them. A story does not need to be overly complex and unique in order to be successful — it just needs to be well written.

It is interesting that Anderson notes Stein’s style as “an approach . . . poets must often be compelled to make” (1406). Shouldn’t poetry be separate from the short story genre? To combine the two, or to use elements of one in the other, could create chaos. While it is important to be creative with form, writers must also be careful with it. Someone who takes strides too distant from the conventional form risks losing their story altogether, by creating something they did not intend to.

Hands & Miss Furr and Miss Skeene

1. The main conflict of the story “Hands”
Wing is a fat little, homely, balding man. When he was young he was a teacher in Pennsylvania, his name then was Adolph Myers. He loved his students and he communicated with his students by his hands, and sometimes he would express his thoughts by touching them, not in sensitive places, just in shoulders or their hair. However this behavior led him into a big trouble. A half-witted boy started an allegation of molestation. So he had to leave Pennsylvania to escape from their parents’ hustled off. The whole time, they warned him repeatedly, “Keep your hands to yourself.” Biddlebaum did not understand why the boys’ parents were so angry, but held the idea that it was his hands’ fault so he tried to keep them still and hidden in his trouser pockets after the incident. After that he changed his name, speaks less and put his hands in his trouser pockets, since once he began to talk his hands would became uproarious. He thought he should use his hands to express his ideas deeply. But on the other hand, he doesn’t want let himself to get such a trouble any more.
Wing’s hands cause conflict within himself. He is a person who really wants to show his own ideas with his hands when he is talk, but he does not understand why his hands are looked upon as a problem by others, and so he becomes lonely, and lives a life in isolation. His only friend is George Willard; He cannot seem to keep his hands still, though he often tries to keep them hidden in the pockets. when he talks with George, he becomes outspoken “When he talked to George Willard, Wing Biddlebaum closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house…he sought out a stump or the top board of a fence and with his hands pounding busily talked with renewed ease.” and talk to George with active “Pausing in his speech, Wing Biddlebaum looked long and earnestly at George Willard. His eyes glowed. Again he raised the hands to caress the boy and then a look of horror swept over his face.”
Wings has his own dream in his deep heart and he encourages George to make dream “‘you must try to forget all you have learned,” said the old man. “You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices.’” But in fact, Wings is a little bit afraid of dream, since he even couldn’t balance what is he really want and his awkward personal situation.
Among the other conflicts in the story are the fact that Biddlebaum’s skillful hands brings him fame in Winesburg, but it also marks him as different, and as such keeps him isolated from others “In Winesburg the hands had attracted attention merely because of their activity. With them Wing Biddlebaum had picked as high as a hundred and forty quarts of strawberries in a day. They became his distinguishing feature, the source of his fame.”

2.The similarities and differences between “Hands” and “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”
Similarities: both “Hands” and “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” had mentioned homosexual. In “Hands”, Wing touched his students’ shoulders or hair led their parents’ misunderstood of him. In “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”, the word “gay” just go through the whole story.
Differences: the most difference between “Hands” and “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” is “ Hands” is a good story, I can figure out what was the author talking about. But “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” is really confusing me. At first, I couldn’t understand the actually meaning of “gay”. I don’t know it stand for lesbian or happy. Next, I don’t know what the author want to show us. She just mentioned “gay” again and again, and also mentioned the sentences over and over, which had the same meaning “They stayed there and were gay there, not very gay there, just gay there. … regular in being a gay one who was one not being gay longer than was needed to be one being quite a gay one. They were both gay then there and both working there then.”All her sentence was not complex. At last, I think this story has no plot, no theme and no characters development. I couldn’t remember anything about this story, just make me so faint and remember one word “gay”.

Huili Tang

Stein and Anderson

Carol Brown

Why does Stein use such vagueness in her story and does it hinder the reading of the story?
While reading the story I felt that there was very little description. I felt as though it was vague in every description such as, “There were some dark and heavy men there then. There were some who were not so heavy and some who were not so dark.” Here I felt that the author really did not know what they looked like in the story. It was kind of as though Stein was telling a story that was previously told to her so she was unclear of all the details. I was VERY confused throughout the story about what was happening. It seemed as though everything was moving so fast. Also, the use of alliteration also confused me because the words quite, pleasant, and gay were over used and emphasized. I did not enjoy reading the story because it just felt like someone was telling this story randomly and repeating everything five times. Then I read, “The Gender of Modernism.” When I read this I began to understand better what she was doing (even though it did not make me like the story more) because she explained her thought process, “At any moment that you are conscious of knowing anything, memory plays no part. When any of you feels anybody else, memory doesn’t come into it. You have the sense of the immediate. Remember that my immediate forebears were Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and so forth, and you will see what a struggle it was to do this thing. This was one of my first efforts to give the appearance of one time-knowledge, and not to make it a narrative story.” I think that she was trying to produce just the thoughts off the top of a person’s head telling the story for the first time. Therefore, there is some repetition and there is an emphasis on certain words because the person is trying to get their point across to those who do not know what is going on.
Anderson uses symbolism with hands in the story, and how does Anderson use this symbolism to follow what he says in “Form, Not Plot, in the Short Story?”
When reading “Hands” I thought that it was easy to follow and easy to read. Right off the bat I realized that a person’s hands were playing a distinct role in the story. You could even claim that they were themselves a character telling another story or hiding part of the story from the reader. The story eludes to a few things while using the hands. They elude that Wing is fighting something inside of himself and his hands are playing out whatever is inside of him. In his article, “Form, Not Plot, in the Short Story” Anderson talks about how the tone comes first in the story and we can see that in “Hands” that the hands in the story are creating this secretive tone over the whole story. I feel like he is taking a small part of an event that was going on in America and rewriting it in a way that addresses the issue in a secretive way. He addresses the issues with Priests in the church, by telling the story of Wing and his hands. That is what I think he doing because in the Form article he discusses taking history and rewriting it. I think that he is using this issue with priests in the church, but I’m also not sure exactly when this issue came to light. Since the story was written in 1919, I’m not sure if this issue had been brought to the surface or if it was something that was going on and no one talked about it.

Stein and Anderson

Wang Chen

ENGL 311

Dr. Drake

Feb. 2009

QQ 3

1.      The slight change and movement in Stein’s Hands.

2.      What influence does Stein have on Anderson? What are their differences and similarities?

When I first read Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” it really drove me into a confusing situation. I did not know what she wanted to express and just found that she repeat the same sentence again and again. But when I read it carefully, I began to realize that every sentence has some slight change from the other.

For instance, the second paragraph:

        They were both gay there, they were regularly working there both of them cultivating their voices there, they were both gay there. Georgine Skeene was gay there and she was regular in being gay, regular n not being gay, regular in being a gay one who not being gay longer than was needed to be one being quite a gay one. They were both gay then there and both working there then (1198).

At first, it leaves a confusing impression on readers. She just puts so many similar sentences together and repeats them. It seems full of twists and turns and hard to understand. But when we notice the minutiae and details, the personality, characteristics of the character becomes more and more clear; this result is what Stein wants to reach.

According to Stein’s words in “How Writing Is Writing,” when she is writing, she always has a conception of whole. She says, “I had this idea of a whole thing” (490); “and I conceived it as a whole made up of its parts” (490). It is what Stein’s writing style different from other. It is a new and novel paper for me. I think it is really interesting style that I had never met before.

Stein points out, she “would wait until I got a picture of you as individuals and then I’d change them until I got a picture of you as a whole” (495). Let’s take the same paragraph of the story as an example. At first, we just know that Helen and Skeene are just gay there, and then through her following sentences, we can realize that how their life be, what they do there and the goal of their life. Readers cannot understand the characters immediately; they begin to know them bit by bit, step by step. The more they read the more things they can discover. It is what makes me feel really interesting.

And Stein is one of writers who have a big influence on Sherwood Anderson. Just as Anderson himself says, when he seeks a new way of writing, he meets Stein’s work “Tender Buttons.” It makes him excited, and he tries to deal with “words separated from sense” as Stein does. They both emphasize more on form than plot. Readers merely cannot find too much plot in Stein’s stories, such as her “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” she is just telling.

Compared Anderson with Stein, maybe Anderson’s have more plot, but still not much. Words are only the surface, what they do is trying to move the audience, let them know the deep meaning they want to say behind a story. In his “Hands,” Anderson does not tell much about what happens. The only incident describes in detail is what happens when Biddlebaum was a teacher in the Pennsyvania town. On the contray, Anderson just describes a man who named “Wing Biddlebaum” and his hands. Their new writing style challenges American tradition and give the short story a totally novel form. But as far as I concerned, it is also what makes readers a little more difficult to understand their works as they give each words

 

Stein and Anderson

1. How does Gertrude Stein’s short story “Miss Fur and Miss Skeene” compare to what she wrote in essay “How Writing is Written?”

I have to admit that I did not particularly care for “Miss Fur and Miss Skeene. I found the story to be very monotonous, which I suppose the receptiveness of the story, was part of Stein’s point, but for me it simply made the story uninteresting and it muddled the point. I cannot for sure say what Stein was attempting to say through her short story. However, I can still compare the story to her essay. Specifically the later part of her essay in which she speaks of repetition as being important: “The question of repetition is very important. It is important because there is no such thing.” I disagree with Stein on this point because the use of repetition in “Miss Fur and Miss Skeene” just becomes too much. It is one thing to repeat a phrase or word every once in a while, but Stein goes much farther than that, “They stayed there and were gay there, not very gay there, just gay there. They were both gay there, the were regularly working there both of them cultivating their voices there, they were both gay there. Georgine Skeen was gay there and she was regular, regular in being gay, regular in not being gay, regular in being a gay one who was not being gay longer than was needed to be on being quite a gay one. They were both gay then there and both working there then.” Stein repeats herself numerous times in just that brief paragraph; saying the same thing over and over. They were gay were they were…we get it! Another reason I did not like the repetition was because it became almost poetic while reading it. I could help but form a pattern in my head while I was reading it. A pattern of beats much like in a long poem.

2. What do the “hands” represent in the story “Hands?” What was Anderson attempting to do in his story?

The story “Hands” is a very accessible story and is really easy to read. That was Anderson’s point. He wanted his reader to be able to understand his stories, and he wanted to use, “common words of our daily speech in shops and offices.” He felt that the short story was for “the American reader.” He wanted to portray characters that his readers could relate to. And in “Hands he has achieved that. He creates characters that we can relate to and understand. The hands of Wing Biddlebaum are something that feels he must show so that he doesn’t get in trouble, but at the same time he does his very best to hide them from the world. He feels that his hands are the reason he has gotten into trouble in the past, but they are a part of him, a part of him that he is ashamed of. Wing does his best to hide them, but his hands are such a part of him that he cannot help but show them. His hands are just like the things in our lives that he try and hide from the outside world, things that if people knew about we would be in trouble. We all have secrets, most of them are less visible than hands, but that does not mean they are less real. I think with the hands Anderson was attempting to expose something. He wanted to expose that secret. That thing that we all keep locked away (or maybe in our pockets). Wing’s hands were something that disturbed himself. They were a secret that he didn’t want. He didn’t want his own hands. I think most of us don’t want that thing. It’s not something we are proud of otherwise it wouldn’t be a secrete. I also think that the reason Wing beats his hands so when he is talking is to punish them for whatever they had done. We all try and do that too. We all try and beat down that secrete, but it is a part of us and we can’t really let it go.

“In Our Time” Part Two

1. Why is bullfighting so present in the vignettes?

2. What is the continuing connection between the short stories and vignettes? How do the the short stories relate to one another?  How do the vignettes relate to one another? And how do the stories relate to the vignettes?

In Our Time Q’s

According to Hemingway, how does one become a man?

What role does fishing play in the stories?

In Our Time Q’s

What do the mini-stories before each chapter add to the short stories, if anything?

Are the stories related to one another as Hemingway claimed they were?