The Blacker the Berry

The Skin Chromatograph & “the haunting chimera of intra-racial color prejudice.”  (70)

In contemplating Wallace Thurman’s “The Blacker the Berry” it is important to take into account the thoughts of Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, author of the Introduction to Thurman’s book as well as the “The Sweeter the Juice,” when she states that “since earliest recorded history, skin color has been put on a vertical chromatograph with the lightest color, usually called ’white,’ at the top, and the darkest color, generally labeled ‘black,’ at the bottom” (9).   This concept of a “chromatograph” as used in this particular instance is suggestive of the process of chromatography, which involves the separation of complex mixtures and thusly implies that pigmentation or “complexion,” as Thurman’s Emma Lou refers to differentiations in skin color, can be grouped and/or dichotomized based upon their particular shade, hue or tint.  Haizlit’s belief that color, otherwise known as “a quality of visible phenomena, distinct from form and from light,” is something that has been used to implement a quasi-“pigmentocracy,” or hierarchy dependent upon the different levels of protein within each of our own skins and further that this “pigmentocracy” has been structured such that the lighter the color of one’s skin the higher one’s prestige.  Haizlit implies that implications of this “pigmentocracy” even go so far as to foster “intra-racial colorism” and that she herself is an advocate of the “revision and repositing of the skin chromatograph” to eliminate the existence of  a hierarchy based upon skin color altogether.   

Thurman’s novel is fraught with incidents brought about as a result of this “pigmentocracy.”  For example, the main character, a young girl by the name of Emma Lou is introduced as being much darker or “blacker” than any of the other people around her in Boise Idaho.  She is the only girl of color at her high school graduation and is thusly embarrassed by the fact that she is forced to wear white, emphasizing a contrast between the whiteness of the robes and her “black” skin.  She further expresses, regarding her high school diploma, that “the tragedy of her life was that she was too black.  Her face and not a slender roll of ribbon-bound parchment was to be her future identification tag in society” (23).  This expression is the first clear illustration of Emma Lou’s awareness of the “pigmentocracy” affecting her life.   Emma Lou confesses that she is treated poorly as a result of her skin complexion by her mother and grandmother and that it is only her Uncle Joe who suggests that she is worth much more than everyone seems to be giving her credit for.  An example of her mother’s discrimination against Emma Lou, which is often recounted is that her mother felt that “[Emma Lou] should have been a boy, then color of skin wouldn’t have mattered so much, for wasn’t her mother always saying that a black boy could get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment?” (22) Throughout the novel, Emma Lou recounts disturbingly mantra-esqe statements, constantly reminding herself of the present “pigmentocracy” such as follows:  “Her birth had served no good purpose,” and “There was no place in the world for a girl as black as she anyway” (31-34).  She expresses that her own grandmother is involved in a group practicing in the structuring of the “pigmentocracy,” in that, her grandmother firmly believed in her own superiority over other African Americans of darker complexion.  Example of her grandmother’s specific beliefs can be found as follows:  “Were they not a superior class?   Were they not a very high type of Negro, comparable to the persons of color groups in the West Indies?  And were they not entitled, ipso facto, to more respect and opportunity and social acceptance than more pureblooded Negroes?”  (28)  This ideology seems to be firmly imprinted within Emma Lou’s psyche to the point where it becomes inhibitory, in that, wherever Emma Lou goes she is of the perception that worth seems to be measured by color.  It is not that she is entirely incorrect, in that, there are many who seem to measure worth, within the context of the novel, by the complexion of one’s skin.  Example of this can be seen, in particular, when Emma Lou asks to be given a chance at joining “Cabaret Gal” later on and where the director informs her that a particular “color scheme” is intended and that she does not fit in.  As a result of this, Emma Lou perceives a widening differentiation between herself and those of mulatto or lighter skin complexions, such as her employer Arline.  

Emma Lou is constantly concerned with becoming involved with the “right type of people.”  She specifically states, upon meeting Hazel Mason at the University of Southern California that “All of her life she had heard talk of the ‘right sort of people,’ and of ‘the people who really mattered,’ and from these phrases she had formed a mental image of those to whom they applied. Hazel Mason most certainly could not be included in either of these categories.”  (50)  Through Emma Lou’s perception of Hazel we see Emma Lou’s own participation in the structuring and maintenance of a “pigmentocracy,” which seems to be preventing any possibility of a unified African American community emerging out of reconstruction.  Emma Lou compares herself to Hazel, in that, she believes “her skin was not rough and pimply, nor was her hair kinky, nor were her nostrils completely flattened out until they seemed to spread all over here face.  No wonder people were prejudiced against dark-skin people when they were so ugly, so haphazard in their dress, and so boisterously mannered as was this present specimen.”  (43)  Hazel is further likened to a “barbarian” and labeled as “ignorant” and “ugly” by Emma Lou, all illustrating the depths to which the “pigmentocracy” has affected and, perhaps skewed Emma Lou’s perception.

Emma Lou learns that this “pigmentocracy” is not limited to her semi-white surroundings in “provincial” Boise, but upon learning that the character of Verne, who appears to be of the same complexion as Emma Lou, is only accepted because of her wealthy and powerful father the Cardinal, Emma Lou comes to the realization that the chromatograph is not merely a regional problem.  “Emma Lou did not know what to make of this.  She did not want to believe that the same color prejudice which existed among the blue veins in Boise also existed among the colored college students.”  (56-57)  She further expresses that “all the Negro leaders and members of the Negro upper class, were either light skinned themselves or else had light-skinned wives.  A wife of dark complexion was considered a handicap unless she was particularly charming, wealthy, or beautiful.  An ordinary-looking dark woman was no suitable mate for a Negro man of prominence.  The college youths on whom the future of the race depended practiced this precept of their elders religiously” (60).  This illustrates a fundamental problem, in that, a cycle of discrimination dependant upon complexion is being perpetuated by the elders within the “negro” community teaching their children prejudice.  Emma Lou learns that whether Boise or Los Angeles the unfortunate “pigmentocracy” abounds, even in the simplest of practices keeping all but mulatto girls out of a sorority founded by African American girls.

Thurman’s “The Blacker the Berry” illustrates the significant movements and migrations of African Americans in the earlier years of the twentieth century, in that, Emma Lou’s own grandparents are described as having fled to the Rocky Mountains to escape the “virus,” otherwise called “nigger hatred” and also to escape the “hordes of hungry, ragged, ignorant black folk arriving from the South in such great numbers, packed like so many stampeding cattle in dirty, manure-littered box cars” (26).  This description is disturbing, in that, it fully illustrates their own prejudices against “black folk.”  “The Blacker the Berry” further emphasizes the issue of migration, in that, Emma Lou’s hope is that she will be able to escape the “pigmentocracy” of Boise by moving to Los Angeles.  She is lead to believe, by her Uncle Joe, that “’People in large cities … are broad.  They do not have time to think of petty things.  The people in Boise are fifty years behind the times, but you will find that Los Angeles is one of the world’s greatest and most modern cities, and you will be happy there” (35).   As stated earlier, Emma Lou is of the opinion that “Boise was a provincial town, given to the molding of provincial people with provincial minds.  Boise was a backward town out of the mainstream of modern thought and progress.  Its people were cramped and narrow, their intellectual concepts stereotyped and static.  Los Angeles was a happy contrast in all respects.”  (37)

          Further, when Emma Lou travels to Harlem in New York, there is an immediate sense that Harlem in NY is no different from Boise in Idaho or Los Angeles in California.  The first real glimpse of Harlem that the reader gets is when Emma Lou describes the employment agency she visits:  “Sour smells assailed her nostrils once more.  Rasping voices.  Pleading voices.  Tired voices.  Domineering voices.  And the insistent ring of the telephone bell all re-echoed in her had against her eardrums” (81).  Also the agency is described as “cagey” and “crowded,” “noisy” and “pregnant with clashing body smells” (81-82).  Further the agency is described as having only one window in a particular room “facing a brick wall on the outside” and “two telephones, both busy.” (84)  People in the agency are described as having “sullen faces”  “Dull black eyes in watery sockets”  (85)  Once Emma Lou leaves the agency, her apartment complex is described as having “No privacy” and “little fresh air”  (95)  Prejudices are evident in Harlem, just as they were in Boise and Los Angeles as remarks, such as “Man, you know I don’t haul no coal” are made about Emma Lou by passers even by the character of Braxton who, in talking to the character of Alva later on, expresses his disappointment in Alva for becoming involved with such a dark skinned girl.  The city is further made to seem like a horrible place, in that, Emma Lou’s apartment is said to smell of “fish and cabbage” (118).  Emma Lou is further taken advantage of by a character named Jasper, who is nice to her and asks her for money so that he can secure a job, but then after she helps him, she never hears from him again.  The lobby in which she waits for Jasper is described as follows:  “the dirty marble hallway where she was stifled by urinal smells and stared at by passing people, waited for about ten minutes, then, in answer to his call, climbed one flight of stairs, and was led into a well furnished, though dark, apartment”  (126).  Toward the end of the book, it becomes clear that no matter where Emma Lou might travel, whether Boise, Lose Angeles, New York, or Kansas, the specter of a “pigmentocracy” will follow her and she will not be able to escape the discriminatory prejudices of society around her.  Emma Lou reflects, upon coming to a Western Union and while thinking about returning home after Alva turns out to be taking advantage of her and using her as a “black mammy” for Alva, Jr. as follows:  “She had once fled to Los Angeles to escape Boise, then fled to Harlem to escape Los Angeles, but these mere geographical flights had not solved her problems in the past, and a further flight back to where her life had begun, although facile of accomplishment, was too futile to merit consideration”  (215). 

What is unclear is the degree to which Emma Lou brings these problems associated with color upon herself.  In a fight, which ends her first experience with Avla, prior to Geraldine’s return and the birth of Alva, Jr., Emma Lou states as follows:  “Color-conscious . . . who wouldn’t be color-conscious when everywhere you go people are always talking about color.  If it didn’t make any difference they wouldn’t talk about it, they wouldn’t always be poking fun, and laughing and making jokes.”  (179)  Alva seems to be of the impression that Emma Lou is incorrect in her assessment and that if she would be less focused or “color-conscious” that she would be more comfortable and more able to maneuver socially regardless of the obvious chromatograph and resultant “pigmentocracy.”  It is obvious that this problem extends beyond Emma Lou’s own mind, however, in that, many of the people she encounters suffer from the same nurtured misconceptions – that differentiation in complexion really makes a difference in the worth of a human being. 

langston hughes

Born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, Langston Hughes grew up mainly in Lawrence, Kansas, but also lived in Illinois, Ohio, and Mexico.

By the time Hughes enrolled at Columbia University in New York, he had already launched his literary career with his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in the Crisis, edited by W E. B. Du Bois. He had also committed himself both to writing and to writing mainly about African Americans.

Hughes's sense of dedication was instilled in him most of all by his maternal grandmother, Mary Langston, whose first husband had died at Harpers Ferry as a member of John Brown's band, and whose second husband (Hughes's grandfather) had also been a militant abolitionist. Another important family figure was John Mercer Langston, a brother of Hughes's grandfather who was one of the best-known black Americans of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Hughes struggled with a sense of desolation fostered by parental neglect. He himself recalled being driven early by his loneliness 'to books, and the wonderful world in books.’

Leaving Columbia in 1922, Hughes spent the next three years in a succession of menial jobs. But he also traveled abroad. He worked on a freighter down the west coast of Africa and lived for several months in Paris before returning to the United States late in 1924. By this time, he was well known in African American literary circles as a gifted young poet.

His major early influences were Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, as well as the black poets Paul Laurence Dunbar, a master of both dialect and standard verse, and Claude McKay, a radical socialist who also wrote accomplished lyric poetry. However, Sandburg, who Hughes later called "my guiding star," was decisive in leading him toward free verse and a radically democratic modernist aesthetic.

His devotion to black music led him to novel fusions of jazz and blues with traditional verse in his first two books, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). His emphasis on lower-class black life, especially in the latter, led to harsh attacks on him in the black press. With these books, however, he established himself as a major force of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, in the Nation, he provided the movement with a manifesto when he skillfully argued the need for both race pride and artistic independence in his most memorable essay, 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."

By this time, Hughes had enrolled at the historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, from which he would graduate in 1929. In 1927 he began one of the most important relationships of his life, with his patron Mrs. Charlotte Mason, or "Godmother," who generously supported him for two years. She supervised the writing of his first novel, Not Without Laughter (1930)--about a sensitive, black midwestern boy and his struggling family. However, their relationship collapsed about the time the novel appeared, and Hughes sank into a period of intense personal unhappiness and disillusionment.

One result was his firm turn to the far left in politics. During a year (1932-1933) spent in the Soviet Union, he wrote his most radical verse. A year in Carmel, California, led to a collection of short stories, The Ways of White Folks (1934). This volume is marked by pessimism about race relations, as well as a sardonic realism.

After his play Mulatto, on the twinned themes of miscegenation and parental rejection, opened on Broadway in 1935, Hughes wrote other plays, including comedies such as Little Ham (1936) and a historical drama, Emperor of Haiti (1936). Most of these plays were only moderate successes. In 1937 he spent several months in Europe, including a long stay in besieged Madrid. In 1938 he returned home to found the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which staged his agitprop drama Don't You Want to Be Free? The play, employing several of his poems, vigorously blended black nationalism, the blues, and socialist exhortation. The same year, a socialist organization published a pamphlet of his radical verse, "A New Song."

With World War II, Hughes moved more to the center politically. His first volume of autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), written in an episodic, lightly comic manner, made virtually no mention of his leftist sympathies. In his book of verse Shakespeare in Harlem (1942) he once again sang the blues. On the other hand, this collection, as well as another, his Jim Crow’s Last Stand (1943), strongly attacked racial segregation.

Perhaps his finest literary achievement during the war came in the course of writing a weekly column in the Chicago Defender that began in 1942 and lasted twenty years. The highlight of the column was an offbeat Harlem character called Jesse B. Semple, or Simple, and his exchanges with a staid narrator in a neighborhood bar, where Simple commented on a variety of matters but mainly about race and racism. Simple became Hughes's most celebrated and beloved fictional creation, and the subject of five collections edited by Hughes, starting in 1950 with Simple Speaks His Mind.

 After the war, two books of verse, Fields of Wonder (1947) and One-Way Ticket (1949), added little to his fame. However, in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) he broke new ground with verse accented by the discordant nature of the new bebop jazz that reflected a growing desperation in the black urban communities of the North. At the same time, Hughes's career was vexed by constant harassment by right-wing forces about his ties to the Left. In vain he protested that he had never been a Communist and had severed all such links. In 1953 he suffered a public humiliation at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who forced him to appear in Washington, D.C., and testify officially about his politics. Hughes denied that he had ever been a party member but conceded that some of his radical verse had been ill-advised.

Hughes's career hardly suffered from this episode. Within a short time McCarthy himself was discredited and Hughes was free to write at length about his years in the Soviet Union in I Wonder as I Wander (1956), his much-admired second volume of autobiography. He became prosperous, although he always had to work hard for his measure of prosperity and sometimes called himself, with good cause, a 'literary sharecropper.’

In the 1950s he constantly looked to the musical stage for success, as he sought to repeat his major coup of the 1940s, when Kurt Weill and Elmer Rice had chosen him as the lyricist for their Street Scene (1947). This production was hailed as a breakthrough in the development of American opera; for Hughes, the apparently endless cycle of poverty into which he had been locked came to an end. He bought a home in Harlem.

The Simple books inspired a musical show, Simply Heavenly (1957), that met with some success. However, Hughes's Tambourines to Glory (1963), a gospel musical play satirizing corruption in a black storefront church, failed badly, with some critics accusing him of creating caricatures of black life. Nevertheless, his love of gospel music led to other acclaimed stage efforts, usually mixing words, music, and dance in an atmosphere of improvisation. Notable here were the Christmas show Black Nativity (1961) and, inspired by the civil rights movement, Jericho--Jim Crow (1964).

For Hughes, writing for children was important. Starting with the successful Popo and Fifina (1932), a tale set in Haiti and written with Arna Bontemps, he eventually published a dozen children's books, on subjects such as jazz, Africa, and the West Indies. Proud of his versatility, he also wrote a commissioned history of the NAACP and the text of a much praised pictorial history of black America. His text in The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), where he explicated photographs of Harlem by Roy DeCarava, was judged masterful by reviewers, and confirmed Hughes's reputation for an unrivaled command of the nuances of black urban culture.

The 1960s saw Hughes as productive as ever. In 1962 his ambitious book-length poem Ask Your Mama, dense with allusions to black culture and music, appeared. However, the reviews were dismissive. Hughes's work was not as universally acclaimed as before in the black community. Although he was hailed in 1966 as a historic artistic figure at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, he also found himself increasingly rejected by young black militants at home as the civil rights movement lurched toward Black Power. His last book was the volume of verse, posthumously published, The Panther and the Lash (1967), mainly about civil rights. He died in May that year in New York City.

In many ways Hughes always remained loyal to the principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in 1926. His art was firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist. He was both nationalist and cosmopolitan. As a radical democrat, he believed that art should be accessible to as many people as possible. He could sometimes be bitter, but his art is generally suffused by a keen sense of the ideal and by a profound love of humanity, especially black Americans. He was perhaps the most original of African American poets and, in the breadth and variety of his work, assuredly the most representative of African American writers.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 1997 by Oxford University Press.

langston hughes

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers:

I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

     went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy

     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

With its allusions to deep dusky rivers, the setting sun, sleep, and the soul, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is suffused with the image of death and, simultaneously, the idea of deathlessness. As in Whitman's philosophy, only the knowledge of death can bring the primal spark of poetry and life. Here Langston Hughes became "the outsetting bard," in Whitman's phrase, the poet who sings of life because at last he has known death. Balanced between the knowledge of love and of death, the poetic will gathers force. From the depths of grief the poet sweeps back to life by clinging to his greatest faith, which is in his people and his sense of kinship with them. His frail, intimidated self, as well as the image of his father, are liquidated. A man-child is born, soft-spoken, almost casual, yet noble and proud, and black as Africa. The muddy river is his race, the primal source out of which he is born anew; on that "muddy bosom" of the race as black mother, or grandmother, he rests secure forever. The angle of the sun on the muddy water is like the angle of a poet's vision, which turns mud into gold. The diction of the poem is simple and unaffected either by dialect or rhetorical excess; its eloquence is like that of the best of the black spirituals.

From Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 1988. Copyright © by Arnold Rampersad.

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is perhaps the most profound of these poems of heritage and strength. Composed when Hughes was a mere 17 years old, and dedicated to W. E. B. DuBois, it is a sonorous evocation of transcendent essences so ancient as to appear timeless, predating human existence, longer than human memory. The rivers are part of God's body, and participate in his immortality. They are the earthly analogues of eternity: deep, continuous, and mysterious. They are named in the order of their association with black history. The black man has drunk of their life-giving essences, and thereby borrowed their immortality. He and the rivers have become one. The magical transformation of the Mississippi from mud to gold by the sun's radiance is mirrored in the transformation of slaves into free men by Lincoln's Proclamation (and, in Hughes's poems, the transformation of shabby cabarets into gorgeous palaces, dancing girls into queens and priestesses by the spell of black music). As the rivers deepen with time, so does the black man's soul; as their waters ceaselessly flow, so will the black soul endure. The black man has seen the rise and fall of civilizations from the earliest times, seen the beauty and death-changes of the world over the thousands of years, and will survive even this America. The poem's meaning is related to Zora Neale Hurston's judgment of the mythic High John de Conquer, whom she held as a symbol of the triumphant spirit of black America: that John was of the "Be" class. "Be here when the ruthless man comes, and be here when he is gone." In a time and place where black life is held cheap and the days of black men appear to be numbered, the poem is a majestic reminder of the strength and fullness of history, of the source of that life which transcends even ceaseless labor and burning crosses.

Hughes's first poem, published in The Crisis in June, 1921, attracted the attention it did precisely because its author revealed the acute sensitivity to the racial past that Garvey, with his racial romanticism, was then trying to instill in the minds of all. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" heralded the existence of a mystic union of Negroes in every country and every age. It pushed their history back to the creation of the world, and credited them with possessing a wisdom no less profound than that of the greatest rivers of civilization that humanity had ever known, from the Euphrates to the Nile and from the Congo to the Mississippi. . . .

Readers rarely notice that if the soul of the Negro in this poem goes back to the Euphrates, it goes back to a pre-"racial" dawn and a geography far from Africa that is identified with neither blackness nor whiteness--a geography at the time of Hughes's writing considered the cradle of all the world's civilizations and possibly the location of the Garden of Eden. Thus, even in this poem about the depth of the Negro's soul Hughes avoids racial essentialism while nonetheless stressing the existential, racialized conditions of black and modern identity.

Hughes captures the African American's historical journey to America in what is perhaps his signature poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Dedicated to W E. B. Du Bois and using water or the river as a metaphor for the source of life, the poem traces the movement of black life from the Euphrates and Nile rivers in Africa to the Mississippi. Hughes subtly couches his admonishment of slavery and racism in the refrain "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." The first time the line appears in the poem it follows the poet's assertion that he has known rivers "ancient as the world and older than the flow of / human blood in human veins." The poet here identifies himself and his blackness with the first human beings. The second and only other time the line appears in the poem occurs after the poet has made reference to Mississippi, New Orleans, and Abe Lincoln. He places the lines "My soul has grown deep like the rivers" at the end of the poem, this time suggesting that he is no longer the same man who "bathed in the Euphrates" and "built [his] hut near the Congo." He is now a black man who has experienced the pain of slavery and racism, and his soul now bears the imprint of these experiences.

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers," then, is only the beginning of a long chain of poems by Hughes which confront, distill, extend, and transform the historical experience of black people into an art both limpid and programmatic. As in all of Hughes' hallmark poems, its distillation is as extreme as any in Issa's haiku. The "I" of the poem is not that of "a" Negro but "the" Negro, suggesting the whole of the people and their history. Most of the consonants--d's, n's, l's, s's—are soft, and of the vowels, long o's reoccur, contributing by sound the effect of an ancient voice. The tone of the repeated declarative sentences is muted, lulling. Every element of the poem combines to suggest that when the Negro speaks of rivers it is with the accumulated wisdom of a sage. The function of a sage is to impart the sometimes secret but long accumulated history of a people to its younger members so that they might make the lessons of the past active in the future. This impartation occurs in the central stanza of the poem:

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
    down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom
    turn all golden in the sunset.

Moving by suggestion, by naming particular rivers and particular activities performed nearby, the poem implicates the whole history of African and American slavery without ever articulating the word. "I bathed in the Euphrates" and "I built my hut near the Congo" are the normal activities of natural man performed in his natural habitat. That may be an unnecessarily anthropological way of putting it, but the lines are the equivalent of the speaker having said, "I made my life undisturbed in the place where I lived." The shift--and the lesson--occurs in the next two lines. Raising the pyramids above the Nile was the act of slaves, and if ever "Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans," it would have been in the context of American slavery and the Civil War. Implicit in the history of a people who had first been free and then enslaved is the vision of freedom regained, and therein lies the program. The final line of the poem, "My soul has grown deep like the rivers," suggests wisdom in the word "deep." The wisdom imparted by the poem, beyond the memory of the suffering of slavery, includes a more deeply embedded memory of freedom. This is perhaps the more powerful memory, or the more sustaining one, and even if deferred, will reemerge in one form or another.

The double identification with penetrative time and receptive timelessness appears perhaps most notably in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (Crisis, June 1921), a poem dedicated to the late W. E. B. Du Bois. "Rivers" presents the narrator's skill in retracing known civilization back to the source in East Africa. Within thirteen lines and five stanzas, through the suggestion of wisdom by anagoge, we re-project ourselves into aboriginal consciousness. Then the speaker affinns the spirit distilled from human history, ranging from 3000 B.C. through the mid-nineteenth century to the author himself at the brink of the Harlem Renaissance. The powerful repetend "I've known rivers. / Ancient, dusky rivers" closes the human narrative in nearly a circle, for the verse has turned itself subtly from an external focus to a unified and internal one: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers." Except for the physical and spiritual dimensions, the subjective "I" and the "river" read the same.

When the Euphrates flows from eastern Turkey southeast and southwest into the Tigris, it recalls the rise as well as the fall of the Roman Empire. For over two thousand years the water helped delimit that domain. Less so did the Congo, which south of the Sahara demarcates the natural boundaries between white and Black Africa. The latter empties into the Atlantic ocean; the Nile flows northward from Uganda into the Mediterranean; in the United States the Mississippi River flows southeast from north central Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Whether north or south, east or west, "River" signifies the fertility as well as the dissemination of life in concentric half-circles. The liquid, as the externalized form of the contemplative imagination, has both depth and flow. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" reclaims the origins in Africa of both physical and spiritual humanity.

langston hughes

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards all torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor --

Bare.

But all the time

I'se been a-climin' on,

And reachin' landin's,

And turnin' corners,

And sometimes goin, in the dark

Where there ain't been no light.

So boy, don't you turn back.

Don't you set down on the steps

'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.

Don't you fall now --

For I'se still goin', honey,

I'se still cimbin'

And Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

langston hughes

The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,

     I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

     He did a lazy sway . . .

     He did a lazy sway . . .

To the tune o' those Weary Blues.

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

     O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

     Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man's soul.

     O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--

     "Ain't got nobody in all this world,

       Ain't got nobody but ma self.

       I's gwine to quit ma frownin'

       And put ma troubles on the shelf."

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.

He played a few chords then he sang some more--

     "I got the Weary Blues

       And I can't be satisfied.

       Got the Weary Blues

       And can't be satisfied--

       I ain't happy no mo'

       And I wish that I had died."

And far into the night he crooned that tune.

The stars went out and so did the moon.

The singer stopped playing and went to bed

While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.

He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

In The Big Sea Hughes reported that his "Weary Blues," which won him his first poetry prize, "included the first blues [he's] ever heard way back in Lawrence, Kansas, when [he] was a kid."

The blues verse in "The Weary Blues:"

I got de weary blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got de weary blues
And can't be satisfied.
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died.

is very close to the "Texas Worried Blues" recorded by songster Henry Thomas in 1928:

The worried blues
God, I'm feelin' bad.
I've got the worried blues
God, I'm feelin' bad.
I've got the worried blues
God, I'm feelin' bad.

In "The Weary Blues" Hughes dealt with the blues singer and his song in relation to the speaker of the poem. The poem gave its title to Hughes'' first volume, published in 1926.

Donald Dickinson saw the first verse of "The Weary Blues" as "an alliterative innovation in the style of Lindsay's 'The Congo.'" However, the verse, with its references to crooning, its strategic repetition of the "lazy sway" line, and its description of a blues performer and his playing, seems to derive partly from the vaudeville blues tradition as well. For example, Richard M. Jones's "Jazzin' Baby Blues," recorded in 1922 by Alberta Hunter and by Ethel Waters, and in 1923 by King Oliver and by Eva Taylor, discussed the way "that old piano man he sure can jazz 'em some":

Jazzin' baby blues are drivin' me insane
There's nothin' to them but that lonesome blue refrain.
But when that cornet and that flute begin to play,
Just make me get right up and throw myself away.
Just play those jazzin' baby
Blues for me all night and day.

Bessie Smith's recording of Fletcher Henderson's "Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town" celebrated the clarinet playing of a man with no professional training:

Jazzbo Brown from Memphis Town,
He's a clarinet hound!
He can't dance,
He can't sing,
But Lawdy, how he can play that thing!

He ain't seen no music, too.
He can't read a note.
But he's the playin'est fool
On that Memphis boat.

Hughes's poem, too, deals with the singer and his song, but Hughes presents the flip-side of the romantic vaudeville blues image of the wild and celebrated jazz player, good-timing his way through life. It is doubly significant that Hughes gave his volume the title of this poem and that it is the first poem (following "Proem") in the volume. It suggests that the entire volume begins with and is informed by the "weary blues," and the tradition with which one must come to grips.

The poem itself is a third-person description with some interpolated first-person, eight- and twelve-bar blues lyrics, giving it a sophisticated structure not unlike some vaudeville blues songs.

. . .

Clearly in this poem the blues unite the speaker and the performer in some way. There is an immediate implied relationship between the two because of the ambiguous syntax. The "droning" and "rocking" can refer either to the "I" or to the "Negro," immediately suggesting that the music invites, even requires, the participation of the speaker. Further, the words suggest that the speaker's poem is a "drowsy syncopated tune" as well, connecting speaker and performer even further by having them working in the same tradition. The performer remains anonymous, unlike Bessie Smith's Jazzbo Brown, because he is not a famous, celebrated performer; he is one of the main practitioners living the unglamorous life that is far more common than the kinds of lives the most successful blues stars lived. His "drowsy syncopated tune," which at once implies both rest and activity (a tune with shifting accents), signals the tension between the romantic image and the reality, and very likely influences the speaker to explore the source of the tension between the singer's stoicism and his resignation to his fate as expressed in his blues lyrics. Significantly, the eight-bar blues stanza, the one with no repeat line, is his hopeful stanza. Its presence as an eight-bar stanza works by passing more quickly, reinforcing both his loneliness and the fleeting nature of the kind of hope expressed. This is especially true since the singer's next stanza, a twelve-bar blues, uses the repeat line to emphasize his weariness and lack of satisfaction, and his wish to die.

All the singer seems to have is his moaning blues, the revelation of "a black man's soul," and those blues are what helps keep him alive. Part of that ability to sustain is apparently the way the blues help him keep his identity. Even in singing the blues, he is singing about his life, about the way that he and other blacks have to deal with white society. As his black hands touch the white keys, the accepted Western sound of the piano and the form of Western music are changed. The piano itself comes to life as an extension of the singer, and moans, transformed by the black tradition to a mirror of black sorrow that also reflects the transforming power and beauty of the black tradition. Finally, it is that tradition that helps keep the singer alive and gives him his identity, since when he is done and goes to bed he sleeps like an inanimate or de-animated object, with the blues echoing beyond his playing, beyond the daily cycles, and through both conscious and unconscious states.

Another source of the melancholy aura of the poem is the lack of an actual connection between the performer and the speaker. They do not strike up a conversation, share a drink, or anything else. The speaker observes, helpless to do anything about the performer and his weariness save to write the poem and try to understand the performer's experiences and how they relate to his own. Ultimately he finds the man and his songs wistfully compelling; and he hears in his song the collective weary blues of blacks in America and tries to reconcile the sadness with the sweetness of the form and expression.

The poem is a fitting opening not only to this volume, but to all of Hughes's volumes. It combines traditional blues stanzas that emphasize the roots of African-American experience, touches of vaudeville blues as the roots were being "refined," pride in African-American creativity and forms of expression, and a sense of the weariness that ties together generations of African-Americans. With the words "Sweet Blues," Hughes strikes upon the central paradox with which the poem attempts to come to terms. It is one of his central themes.

From: Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Copyright ©1988 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

The paradoxes of self-veiling [an unassertive, undemanding adaptation to the environment. Its motive--to survive--is positive, but its vision limited] are sharply etched in the title piece of Langston Hughes's first volume of poems, The Weary Blues. The blues singer in the poem transcends "his rickety stool," which seems to represent his life condition and not just the appurtenances of the joint: "He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool." We can reasonably infer that nothing in his life conveys the concentration and depth of his music. He collapses after he plays, and it almost seems that he must alternate between comatoseness and music. His life, then, deeply veils what his music expresses.

But how much certainty do we have concerning what his music expresses? The manner of playing ("like a musical fool") and thematter involved do not chime together. Where his play is vivid, sure, superior, what he sings is all depression and defeat:

. . . .

His stamina as a singer ("far into the night he crooned that tune") does little to offset the intensification of woe in the song, and woe finally seems to have undone him when he "stopped playing and went to bed," for "he slept like a rock or a man that's dead." He has played himself out, and it is impossible to tell whether his woe or his playing has contributed more to his undoing. The blues may give us more than the life, but it gives us meanings veiled in paradox.

But the poem contains a complex reversal. The blues singer's apparent self-exhaustion (for his state is a product of his will, his soul) is counterbalanced by the fact that he has played himself into the heart and mind of the speaker in "The Weary Blues." This effect is less obvious here than in Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper," a strangely analogous poem, but the speaker's attachment comes out in two ways. First, more than the coming of daylight is indicated in the line "The stars went out and so did the moon"; we may understand also that the speaker is possessed by the singer's woe, and his art, and so loses a sense of the world beyond. And second, the speaker is telling as much about himself as about the singer when he says:

The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While The Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

Has the speaker followed the singer home in fascination, in obsession? And in whose head does the echo of the weary blues play? The singer's, yes, but not his alone. The speaker is also bearing "that music," as Wordsworth says, in his heart. Not even the speaker's empathy with the blues singer, though, can enable us to penetrate the latter's veil of sleep, a veil as opaque as rock and as deep as death.

It is an accident that offsets the singer's repetitious self-veilings. Clearly he goes through his routine, his ritual, every night, and as clearly a Langston Hughes does does not often happen by.

From Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. Copyright © 1984 by Michael Cooke.

Hughes's aesthetic works out a trope that brings internality and externality into a state of opposition. One sees an example of how this unfolds in "The Weary Blues." The speaker in the poem documents the experience of listening to a piano player in Harlem play the blues. Steven Tracy's compelling argument asserts that the piano player and speaker are united by the performance.

I would like to argue to the contrary however. In my view, the poem works out Hughes's apprehension, his feeling that his ability to understand the emotions that generated this form of artistic expression was not on a par with the expression itself This is indicated by the last line of the poem, where the speaker notes that the piano player "slept like a rock or a man that's dead." The key word here is "or," for it denotes the imprecision of the speaker's understanding. What the blues articulates is the simultaneous presence of the "tragic and comic aspects of the human conditions." Thus, the blues in the poem is not the conventional "either/or" condition configured within the Cartesian construct. Rather, the piano player, by metaphorizing loneliness has already chosen self-recovery. The poem's last line, then, ignores the blues performer's ability to articulate pain and likewise to subsume it. That the speaker and the piano player never meet, or as Tracy asserts, "strike up a conversation, share a drink, or anything else," suggests that the experience does not rupture the speaker's externality. He never enters that space whereby the piano player is speaking for him, giving utterance to his loneliness. Finally, at no point in time does the speaker in the poem insert himself into the lyrics.

What this implies is that "The Weary Blues" can also be read as an anti-Jazz Age poem. That is, a case can be made in which we need not equate the speaker in the poem with Hughes at all. While Hughes obviously had a strong desire to "link the lowly blues to formal poetry," locking him into the poem ignores its efficacy as cultural commentary. Given the increasing number of whites traveling to Harlem to be entertained in clubs like The Cotton Club, the poem can be seen as an attempt on Hughes's part to warn the community that African American expression was being appropriated by mainstream culture.

The poem's structure enables this reading, if only because the speaker "quotes" the lyrics, but never allows his own voice to give way to them. Moreover, the speaker is "Down on Lenox Avenue. . . " which also, interestingly enough, marks the location of the Cotton Club and thus implies travel from downtown Manhattan. The I/he dichotomy Hughes establishes never collapses, which means that we can read the exteriority of the speaker as that which pertains to someone being entertained, who will leave Harlem after the performance is over. In this respect, the "or" in the last line calls our attention to the slippage that occurs when an understanding of the blues is lacking. That the speaker utters the possibility that the piano player has killed himself illustrates his failure to realize that the blues is performed reflection and not a preface to suicidal behavior.

From "Dead Rocks and Sleeping Men: Aurality in the Aesthetic of Langston Hughes," in The Langston Hughes Review.

The performance in the title poem [. . . .] completes the ritualistic conversion from Black American suffering into epic communion. On 1 May 1925, during a banquet at an "elegant" Fifth Avenue restaurant in New York City, the poem won a prize from Opportunity magazine, where it subsequently appeared. The thirty-five-line lyric presents a singer and pianist who plays on Harlem's Lenox Avenue one night. Having performed well in the club, he goes to bed, as the song still sounds in his mind: "I got de weary blues / And I can't be satisfied." In the "dull pallor of an old gas light," his ebony hands have played on the ivory keys. During the "lazy sway" from the piano stool, he has patted the floor with his feet, struck a few chords, and then sung some more. Finally, he sleeps "like a rock or a man that's dead," the artistic spirit exhausted.

His performance clearly implies several dramatic actions. While one sets the dynamic playing--the Black self-affirmation against what fades--a second presents a vital remaking of the Black self-image. A third shows the transcendence through racial stereotype into lyrical style. From the dramatic situation of the player, both musical as well as performed, the poem imposes isolation and loneliness yet the refusal to accept them. The song marks a metonym for the human imagination. In a deftness often overlooked, Hughes uses anaphora to narrate an imperial self so as to sustain the blues stanza as countermelody and ironic understatement: "Ain't got nobody in all this world, / Ain't got nobody but ma self." What most complements the lyric skill is the dramatic movement of feeling. In narrative distancing his speakers achieve a double identification.

From The Art and Language of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1989 by The University Press of Kentucky.

langston hughes

I, Too

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I'll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody'll dare

Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen,"

Then.

Besides,

They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

langston hughes

Mulatto

Mulatto

mulatto children are not accepted by their white fathers…

Modernist features ~> Protest, denial of white and black

Imagery~ Something you look for in a text…

Imagism~ a movement that lasted 10-12 years in modernism…it does something                 specific…its something stark that demands attention…contrast…

Imagistic Poetry~ In a Station at the Metro…The Red Wheel Barrow…the end of The Lost Beautifulness…

Realism~ presents reality as reality is…

This dramatic dialogue offers a tensely individualized conflict between father and son that is hardened by the vigor and scorn of the words and broadened by carefully placed, suggestive details from nature. The son's adamant voice opens the poem, but is transformed into a passive Negro feminine presence exuberantly recalled by the white father, who feels half-pleasurably nagged in his fancied return to the conception and infancy of his son. The poet, employing the past awakened in the white man, leaves him musing and moves the growing child swiftly through years of hostile rejection by his white half-brothers--implying virtual estrangement from his father, whom he no longer reminds of sexual freedom in the Negro quarter. "Niggers ain't my brother" is the rebuff so ungrammatically worded as to show the displacement of reason and truth by blind social restrictions. In the last third of the poem, the father's reminiscences of woods, stars, and exploitable black women are slightly rephrased, indistinctly merging the author's voice with the father's. At the end, "I am your son, white man!" is repeated as a challenging accusation, weaker now, yet taking precedence over the phrases enclosing it, the author-father's echoes of earlier sensuous memories. Oddly, this is the father's poem. The delicious memories, the unweakened sense of arbitrary power to take and to withhold, the expansive portents of nature, even though ironically misconstrued--all are his. The son is the catalyst, but the father glows. The author expands his profoundly racial material and so convincingly explores a white father's subconscious that the poet's own hovering irony becomes inseparable from the ambivalent remembrances of his subject.

langston hughes

Songs for a Dark Girl

langston hughes

Vagabonds

langston hughes

Genius Child

langston hughes

Refugee in America

langston hughes

Madam and her Madam

I worked for a woman,

She wasn't mean--

But she had a twelve-room

House to clean.

Had to get breakfast,

Dinner, and supper, too--

Then take care of her children

When I got through.

Wash, iron, and scrub,

Walk the dog around--

It was too much,

Nearly broke me down.

I said, Madam,

Can it be

You trying to make a

Pack-horse out of me?

She opened her mouth.

She cried, Oh, no!

You know, Alberta,

I love you so!

I said, Madam,

That may be true--

But I'll be dogged

If I love you!

"Madam and Her Madam"

Main character relates to Hannah in "The Lost Beautifulness"

          Unlike Hannah…the character doesn't have a false consciousness

All of the characters in the poem…according to Hughes…are equal…

langston hughes

Madam’s Calling Card

"Madam's Calling Cards"

Shows a struggle for identity…

The character…Alberta K. Johnson…wants to be recognized as an American…

She defends her identity as an American…

She might be uneducated because she doesn't understand the different writing styles…

Hughes makes a point in poetry that Ellison tries to make in prose…

          - Invisible…and insistence on Americaness…

langston hughes

Silhouette

langston hughes

Visitors to the Black Belt

langston hughes

Note on Commercial Theatre

langston hughes

Democracy

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

jean toomer

from Cane

Georgia’s Dusk

Fern

Georgia Dusk

The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
   The setting sun, too indolent to hold
   A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night's barbecue,

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
   An orgy for some genius of the South
   With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
   And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
   Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill
Their early promise of a bumper crop.

Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
   Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low
   Where only chips and stumps are left to show
The solid proof of former domicile.

Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
   Race memories of king and caravan,
   High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

Their voices rise . . the pine trees are guitars,
   Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . .
   Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane
Is caroling a vesper to the stars . .

O singers, resinous and soft your songs
   Above the sarcred whisper of the pines,
   Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

***Important to note that if you couple Toomer with anyone it should be Eliot or Poud because of his experimentalism. 

Jean Toomer brings several themes together that we’ve talked about this semester. 

1.                  How does “Georgia Dusk” capture the theme of Industrialization?

2.                  What is Toomer trying to say about it in relation to the characters that he draws?

3.                  How is “Fern” a symbol of Georgia the place, and simultaneously a symbol of the African Americans community of Georgia?

-         Important to note that Fern is a person, place and a thing.  It is a metaphor for how the African Americans are rooted in the soil and thusly how they are rooted in the concept of their own nation / America.

4.                  Analyze “Portrait of Georgia.”  How does personification work in the text?

How is Seventh Street a commentary on urban life?

claude mckay

Harlem Dancer

“McKay’s radical politics, already formed in Jamaica, rose from his belief that racism was inseparable from capitalism, which he saw as a structure designed to perpetuate economic inequality.  To him, attacking capitalism was attacking racial injustice.”  (1457)

“In the later years of his life, appalled by Stalin’s purges, McKay repudiated his earlier Communist sympathies.”  (1457)

The Harlem Dancer

APPLAUDING youths laughed with young prostitutes   

And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;    

Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes           

Blown by black players upon a picnic day.                

She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,                     5

The light gauze hanging loose about her form;          

To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm              

Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.             

Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curls                 

Profusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise,                        10

The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,     

Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze;        

But, looking at her falsely-smiling face                    

I knew her self was not in that strange place.            

Everyone is watching her but she’s not there…  There are some characters in the poem who are into the music and into the dancer in a way we see in “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” … Music connection similar to that we see in Blacker the Berry and How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Baldwin, Langston Hughes and McKay all find Jazz music to be a mechanism of going below the surface of consciousness.  Inviting you to think about it as something which holds the African American Community together.

Dancer in Harlem Dancer is creating an effect where the girl is not actually there. 

This is a sonnet form …  rhyme couplet …  inversion of music and language as we have spoken about it (in that the dancer isn’t into the music, but the characters watching are).  The girl represents Harlem.

claude mckay

If We Must Die

If We Must Die

IF we must die—let it not be like hogs                   

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,               

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,     

Making their mock at our accursed lot.                 

If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,                               5

So that our precious blood may not be shed          

In vain; then even the monsters we defy                

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!       

Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;      

Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,                10

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?          

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but—fighting back!      

***McKay argues that racism is a necessary component / element of capitalism (as we see in his biography):  “McKay’s radical politics, already formed in Jamaica, rose from his belief that racism was inseparable from capitalism, which he saw as a structure designed to perpetuate economic inequality.  To him, attacking capitalism was attacking racial injustice.”  (1457)

This is a sonnet…  You can compare this work to Blood on the Forge, in that, there is a distinction between nfighting against the riding boss and the fight of suppression in the north (qualitatively different).

It is important to remember Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” and the riots of 1919 in which lots of people organizing around radical left wing causes.

Who is the audience of this poem:  “The folk” or the masses

We’ve taken all your blows, now we’re going to give you one.

Evacuated sonnet form and given it this reflects his dual identity.

ralph ellison

Invisible Man

1. Interpret the following from Ellison's prologue..

          "That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition in the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality (2077)"

Answer~ invisibility comes with skin color and prejudice. People can physically see him but he is insignificant….People are raised to feel that way towards black people… Even after the fight with the white guy, the black guy was still invisible …He is not a form of humanity that is deserving of equal treatment to the white guy…He is invisible to the ideology that the white guy has…

Beginnings of post modernism~ presents two forms of reality…the one that exists in the white world…and the one that exists for the invisible man…

2. Interpret the following…"…I had a notion that of all in the room she saw only me with her impersonal eyes (2086)." How is this similar to what we see in Harlem Dancer…how is this different?

Answer~  It is similar because…the gender relationship….the women are viewed as objects of desire…and the people don't belong where they are…

It is different because…the race…the consciousness…and the way that the women were viewed as objects of desire…

3.                 Interpret the following…"There was nothing to do but what we were told. All ten of us climbed under ropes and allowed ourselves to be blindfolded with broad white clothes…I wanted to see, to see more desperately than ever before. But the blindfold was tight as a think skin-puckering scab and when I raised my gloved hands to push the layers of white aside a voice yelled, "oh no you don't black bastard! Leave that alone!" (2086-2087)

They had no choice, they had to do what they did, and they didn't fight it. He doesn't mind being invisible but he needed to see that he was something. He was in the dark and needed to know what was going on. Refers back to slavery and share croppers. Technically there is a choice, but they didn't have one. Education is important to him, the scholarship is not an avenue towards upward mobility.

It didn't matter where he thought he was…he was interested in the specific form of power. CAPITALIST POWER Racial separation is used as a hook for capitalist power…Without capitalism…there is no racism…and vice versa…Individuals are no longer human, they exist for capitalist power…

The invisible man thought that his speech was the one thing that would move him up in the world…He wants to use the system because he thinks that the system will make room for him…Ultimately, he will always be black…

Ellison points out that he is interested in being a writer rather than a spokesman for a cause or a representative figure. Does your reading of Invisible Man provide affirmation for his desire, or does your reading contradict his desire? What do you make of this statement? Is it possible for an African American to simply be a writer? What, for instance, does it mean to suggest that "the richness of life and art becomes possible when the imagination is liberated from close realism."

Answer~ He is not trying to live an aristocratic life. At one point he agrees with society and how they see him. The society only recognizes him (black people altogether) when they do something wrong. He builds his story off of his experiences.

Social interaction is essential to human beings…

Ellison attaches construction of racism to capitalism and materialism…He (the invisible man) wanted to show the art in the construction of society- racism, whiteness, blackness.

 He uses his intellect to draw pictures and he makes illusions to obscure things..

james baldwin

Going to Meet the Man

One Never forgets What They are Taught James Baldwin, an African American author born in Harlem, was raised by his violent step-father, David. His father was a lay preacher who hated whites and felt that all whites would be judged as they deserve by a vengeful God (Klinkowitz and Pritchard, p.1999). Usually, the father's anger was directed toward his son through violence. Baldwin's history, in part, aids him in his insight of racism within the family. He understands that racists are not born, but rather racists' attitudes and behaviors are learned in the early stages of childhood. Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man is a perfect example of his capability to analyze the growth of a innocent child to a racist. Every child is born with innocence. During the flashback to Jesse's childhood, where he witnesses the mutilation and torture of a blackman, Jesse's innocence is apparent. Jesse has a black friend named Otis who he hasn't seen for a few days. When he asks his father where Otis is, the father replies, I reckon Otis's folks was afrad to let him show himself this morning(Baldwin, p. 2006). Jesse naturally responds, But Otis ain't do nothing. His father explains, We just wanna make sure Otis don't do nothing, and you tell him what your Daddy said(Baldwin, p. 2006). This statement implies that because Otis is black, he is eventually going to do something wrong. The father has subconsciously put negative thoughts inside of Jesse's head. Baldwin's own father also acted in this way when he stereotyped all whites as being bad and claimed they would be punished by a vengeful God. In the midst of all the commotion, Jesse is unable to sleep the night before the lynching. Within another flashback to that night, Jesse feels a strong need to have his mother close to him but he knew his father would not like this(Baldwin, p. 2006). He wanted to call his mother and becomes very frustrated and angry with his father because the father is the reason that he could not got to his mother. He knows that they are going to have intercourse and this bothers him. He heard his mother's moan, his father's sigh; he gritted his teeth(Baldwin, p. 2006). Sigmund Freud's Edipus Complex explains Jesse's reaction. The Edipus Complex is a son's sexual longing for his mother. Jesse becomes jealous and his father's breathing seemed to fill the world(Baldwin, p. 2006). As result of the longing for the mother, a resentment toward the father arises because the father has the mother all to himself. Jesse, in this situation, would like to replace the father so that he may experience the mother in a sexual manner. Jesse does not shake this feeling until he replaces the longing of his mother with a clossnes to the father, a common effect of the Edipus complex. Jesse's innocence disappears completely during the flashback of the day of the lynching. The father is getting Jesse excited about the violence to come as he assures him, We're going on a picnic. You won't ever forget this picnic(Baldwin, p. 2007), Jesse replies, Are we going to see the bad nigger?(Baldwin, p. 2007). He uses the adjective bad, revealing the influence of the father 's previous comments about the black man. They arrive at the lynching and Jesse's father shows concern toward how Jesse is feeling, you all right?(Baldwin, p. 2009). Then, the father reached down suddenly and sat Jesse on his shoulders, making Jesse feel like he was bonding with his father. He felt secure. They watched the relentless burning of the negro together and Jesse last thought of innocence arouse, What did the man do?(Baldwin, p. 2010). After asking himself he looked to his mother and felt, she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her before and he began to feel a joy he had never felt before(Baldwin, p. 2010). After the Negro genitals were mutilated he was left to slowly die, the father looked to Jesse with peaceful eyes and said, Well, I told you, you wasn't ever going to forget this picnic(Baldwin, p.2010). It is as this moment that Freud's Edipus complex is once again displayed. The bonding and identification felt by Jesse toward the father has replaced the longing for the mother. Jesse loved his father more than he had ever loved him(Baldwin, p. 2010). He feels like a man because, his father had carried throught a mighty test, had revealed to him a great secret which would be the key to his life forever. He subconsciously traded his innocence for closness to his father. There has surely been no black writer better able to imagine whit experience, to speack in various tones of differents kinds and behaviors of people or places other than his own(Klinkowtiz and Pritchard, p. 1999). Going to Meet the Man allows readers to recongnize how a racist is built through ingnorance. Baldwin ends his story with Jesse in bed with his wife. The memories of the mutilation of the negro arise in his mind and he feels arrounsed. He turns to his wife and says, Come on sugar, I'm going to do you like a nigger. Jesse cannot recognize that these memories of the lynching have made him sexually arroused by violence. As a result, he has become a violent man with a disturbed idea of love, sex and blacks.

1.     Baldwin’s exploration of the inner workings of a southern racists mind may, today, seem presumptive.  Discuss the ways in which he succeeds (or not) in this difficult and dangerous feat.  Why might his text be considered difficult and dangerous?

Extremity of the slurs and actions …  it is interesting how we might perceive as hyperbolic nowadays because we are removed from this, however, there are many who are afraid that they may not even come home when they go out the door.

***Baldwin is concerned with the psychology of racism…  what are necessary components going into a racist psychology.  Sex, violence and concept of race connected and according to Baldwin create racism.  According to Professor, on plantations there would be black males utilized for the purpose of impregnating and propagating workforce and thusly African Americans were treated as livestock.  White male psyche needs to possess black sexual prowess, as Jesse becomes depressed man who needs escape so he has sex with black women and abuses/kills black men.

2.     In what ways is Baldwin’s text an important political (perhaps even moral) act or gesture that resonates beyond the usual scope of imaginative fiction?

Wanted to show the radical violence of racism… making political statement but getting into the nature of human beings through social context and through unraveling their psychology.

3.     “These men were his models, they had been friends to his father and they had taught him what it means to be a man” (2195).  What is the significance of this exerpt?  How does it contribute to our understanding of Jesse both as a character in the text and as a prototype?

The perpetuation of a system…  violence begets violence…  dehumanization of African Americans allows the white characters to treat the blacks like less than human.

Jesse is a prototype, in that, he is bred like others into a vicious cycle

What creates Jesse?  - Jesse is representative of changing in concept of morality of this issue of racism.  He knows right –vs- wrong, however, he perpetuates system regardless of what he feels  because it is dictated by social norms mores and learning.

4.     What is the relevance of this story to the period of late modernism we are studying?  How does it reflect the breakup of traditional approaches to texts, American culture, etc.?

Story starts and ends with sex… people so entrenched in their racism that it affects every aspect of their daily life, even the most intimate. 

*** Emmett Till was killed for whistling to a white woman and was beaten and shot and mutilated …  He had gone home to visit …  His mother put his body on display and a photograph was shown in  Jet Magazine…  this event kick started the Civil Rights Movement.

richard wright

The Man Who was Almost a Man

The Man Who Was Almost a Man" chronicles the story of Dave, a young, African-American farm laborer struggling to assert his identity in the restrictive racist atmosphere of the rural South. Longing for a symbol of power and masculinity, Dave fantasizes that owning a gun will win him the respect he craves. After he gets a gun, he learns that he needs more than a gun to earn respect.

• The ironic thing is that the way David thinks he will be a man is actually a very immature act that is looked down upon by the townspeople. His "act of manhood" worked against him
• Everything to try and become a man is done in a very immature/childish way.
• Someone cannot become a man just by one quick event, it is a lengthy slow process.

It runs counter to the politically sensitive rules about how we talk about race.
It's not just that there's the word "nigger." The protagonist is a liar and he's comically stupid, and an angry, confused black man with a gun.  
The only reasonable character in the story without any glaring vices is white Mr. Hawkins. Dave, the protagonist, wishes he had an extra bullet to shoot at this decent man's "white house."  
Wright doesn"'"t emphasize his dysfunctional family and downplay his stupidity and his habitual lying.
On the surface, the message of the story is that black people are stupid, deceitful, unkind, violent and a threat to white people. This man who was almost a man, but not quite, deserves to be called "boy" at 17 and forever. The story ends with a kindly white man being cheating out of $50 and Dave, the black boy-man, riding off into the night with nothing but anger, a gun and a long track record of poor judgment.  
But upon further examination, Dave appears to be less responsible for his shortcomings. His poverty is deep and his parents are awful and he has no future. His desire to get a gun so he can become a man is ignorant, but what other recourse does he have? In his environment there is practically no way he could grow up and develop self respect and the respect of others. Dave is treated just like a mule. He's given no responsibility, not even the chance to hold on to part of his earnings.  
At first we might think he's on such a short leash because he's semi-retarded but when taking a look at the treatment from his parents and his future prospects, it's not hard to see that it could be the result of lowered expectations.  
Dave doesn't want a gun, he wants to be a man, which is a natural, healthy desire that hasn't yet been beat out of him. The fact that he thinks a gun will do the trick is the only solution his environment can have him imagine. Dave's belief that having a gun will make him a man is ridiculous and repellent but as the story turns out, his pursuit of having a gun is his ticket out of town, his only hope for becoming a man.  
Dave stumbles forward in this story, not backward. He's placing trust not in his solutions, but in his burning desire to become a man. And that's what pushes him forward. Some protagonists struggle with their situations and their conflict creates light along with the heat. They learn a lesson, they have a realization, and they take a step forward. Not so for Dave. He burns with desire and the most critical action he takes is one with his eyes closed. He kills the mule and though he doesn't realize it, this sets in motion his liberation, his chance to become a man.  
His environment was too oppressive for him to leave in daylight, with his eyes wide open, knowing exactly what he was doing.  
Growing up, maturing, becoming a man, is not a smooth process. It is not an even series of progressive steps. The past doesn't always fade away. Often you have to kill it before the future can be born. Dave had to kill a mule so that he would not forever be one himself.  
A first glance, it looks like Mr. Hawkins is just a fairly nice fellow. But when Dave inexplicably arrives early for work, Mr. Hawkins just gives him more work to do. In a way, that's what you'd do with a beast of burden that exhibited extra energy and willingness to work. When it is revealed that Dave shot the mule, Mr. Hawkins isn't emotional. Dave didn't disappoint him--he doesn't think of Dave in those terms. He sees Dave as a mule. If he fires him it would be like shooting his own mule. The point is to keep Dave working. Dave senses this and that's why he talks about taking a goodbye shot at his "white house" to put a little fear in him. At least he would be reacting to him with a little human emotion and the fear would serve him right.

sylvia plath

Lady Lazarus

In contemplating Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” as a modernist work my thoughts initially lingered on imagism and the use of imagist metaphors to liken herself to a victim of the holocaust and the likening of the antagonistic forces in her life, within the context of her poem to Nazis or implements of Nazi destruction.  In the following quoted lines, she likens her skin to that of a holocaust victim, whose skin has been used to make a lampshade, as per one of the twisted Nazi practices:  “A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade” (lines 5:6)  She goes so far as to express that her face  is “a featureless, fine / Jew linen” (lines 8:9).  Understanding that Sylvia Plath herself committed suicide is significant in a reading of the poem, in that, it brings out the theme of suicide and death.  As the poem states:  “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well”  (lines 42:45)  The implication in these lines is that death is an action, perhaps carried out by the narrative voice (Plath herself).  Even the name of the poem “Lady Lazarus” hints toward a character re-born out of resurrection and raised from the dead, as the footnotes explain Lazarus was by Jesus in John 11.1-45.  The likening of the narrator to a cat, in that, the expression that the narrator (Plath) has as many lives as a cat and is already on the third rebirth is further example of this repetitive pattern of life, death, and rebirth.  If indeed “Lady Lazarus” is indicative of Plath’s world view and if indeed the thoughts presented in it are intrinsic to her being then the reader gains a sense of what it must be like to live in Plath’s shoes, to experience the “perfect” or typical 1950’s lifestyle, which the introductory biography expresses she lived.  As the introductory biography further indicates: “In her poems, however, we find the strings of such a life; the work is galvanized by suffering, by a terrible construction against which she unlooses ‘the lioness, / The shriek in the bath, / The cloak of holes.’  In articulating a dark vision of domestic life, Plath was adopting the license of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, a fellow student in Lowell’s poetry seminar, to write about ‘private and taboo subjects’” (2968).  Therefore, in spite of her experiences in education and abroad, her marriage to another young poet and the makings of potentially romantic experiences, the real details of her life and her thoughts about her marriage are released through her poetry. 

Lady Lazarus

The name of the poem itself alludes to Lazarus, who himself was raised from the dead by Jesus in John 11.1-45. 

imagism

“I may be skin and bone, / Nevertheless, I am the same identical woman” (lines 33:34)

“For the eying of my scars, there is a change / For the hearing of my heart - / It really goes.”  (lines 58:60)

“Flesh, bone, there is nothing there –“  (75)

“Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”  (lines 82:84)

From Sparknotes.com:

"'Lady Lazarus'"' is an extraordinarily bitter dramatic monologue in twenty-eight tercets. The title ironically identifies a sort of human oxymoron, a female Lazarus—not the biblical male. Moreover, she does not conform to society"'"s traditional idea of ladylike behavior: She is angry, and she wants revenge. She is egocentric, using '"'I'"' twenty-two times, '"'my'"' nine. Her resurrection is owing only to herself. This is someone much different from the grateful man of John 11:2 who owes his life to Jesus.

Given Sylvia Plath"'"s suicide, one might equate this Lazarus with Plath. Self-destruction pervades the poem as it did her life, but she has inventively appropriated Lazarus in constructing a mythical female counterpart that is not simply equatable with herself. This common tactic of distancing autobiography tempers one"'"s proclivity to see the poem as confessional. As confession mutates to myth, subjectivity inclines to generalized feeling.

Lady Lazarus resurrects herself habitually. Like the cat, she allows herself nine lives, including equally their creation and cancellation. The first line may stress her power over her fate, but '"'manage'"' (line 3) suggests an uneasy control. It also connotes managerial enterprise, an implication clarified when the speaker"'"s language takes on the flavor of the carnival.

The first eight stanzas largely vivify this ugly but compelling experience. The reader sees the worm-eaten epidermis and inhales the sour breath. More cadaver than person, Lady Lazarus intends terror, however problematic her bravado. Nevertheless, she will soon smile, when time restores flesh eaten by the grave. (The smile will not prove attractive.) For the moment, however, she is only a '"'walking miracle'"' of defective parts: a shell of glowing skin, a face blank as linen, a paralyzed foot. Almost spectral, she remains finely, grotesquely palpable.
Stanzas 9 to 19 present Lady Lazarus as sideshow freak, stripper, and barker. Her emergence from the winding-sheet (perhaps a straitjacket) is a '"'striptease.'"' The '"'peanut-crunching crowd'"' thrills, pruriently. She alters the introductory '"'Ladies and gentlemen,'"' but her phrasing retains the master of ceremonies"'" idiom. Reference to her '"'theatrical/ comeback in broad day'"' plays poetically with the jargon of show business and magic.

In presenting the history of her efforts to die, Lady Lazarus assures the reader of her honor. This integrity gives continuity, making her the same woman at thirty that she was at ten. It is nothing against her that her first attempt at annihilation was accidental; it was premonitory. Eventually, intention ruled—both descent and resurrection. In the eighteenth stanza, she says that each '"'comeback'"' is, however, to the '"'same place'"' and the '"'same brute/ Amused shout.'"' The prosody allows '"'brute'"' to be a noun (hence, person) in the line, an adjective in the sentence. As it is the '"'same brute'"' each time, beginning with her tenth year, and as she finally intends the destruction of '"'men,'"' this brute is always the father or his replica. This explains why Plath renders the customary '"'Ladies and Gentlemen'"' as '"'Gentleman, ladies.'"'

Stanzas 19 through 26 clarify Lady Lazarus"'" victimization at the hands of '"'Herr Enemy'"' and '"'Herr Doktor,'"' who are one and the same and merely the latest incarnation of the '"'brute'"' father. The German spelling of doctor and the choice of Herr create the stereotype of Germanic male authority. Lady Lazarus is this creature"'"s '"'baby,'"' more particularly his '"'opus.'"' Thus, this menacing figure reminiscent of Josef Mengele, of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, fathers her '"'art'"' of dying. She sarcastically repudiates his inauthentic '"'concern'"' for her but allows him his role in her fiery death and resurrection. Because she was '"'pure gold,'"' he expected profit from her. He pokes among her ashes for valuable residue, but she has reduced herself to '"'nothing'"' but a '"'shriek.'"' Spiritually, however, she is a virtual reliquary, which turns the tables; '"'Herr Enemy'"' will pay, and dearly, for her victimized body and consciousness. There will be a '"'very large charge'"' for '"'eyeing [her] scars,'"' for discovering that her heart '"'really goes,'"' even for a '"'bit of blood'"' or a '"'word.'"'

Having taken up the battle with the enemy on his terms, she concludes by warning the male deity and demon that when she rises from the ashes, she consumes men as fire does oxygen.

Forms and Devices
'"'Lady Lazarus'"' plays distinctively on the ear. It blends staccato, irregular versification with a dense mixture of highly patterned sounds. End and internal rhymes, both exact and slant, are rapidly mixed and steadily joined to consonance, assonance, alliteration, and sheer repetition.  
At the outset, Plath makes end rhymes of '"'again,'"' '"'ten,'"' '"'skin,'"' '"'fine,'"' '"'linen,'"' and '"'napkin'"' before the eleventh line. She dares, in one line, '"'grave cave ate'"' and, in another, '"'million filaments.'"' The '"'brute'"' that ends line 53 is followed at once by the only slightly dissimilar '"'amused.'"' Plath"'"s prosody ingeniously restrains the metronome while rendering sound almost childlike.

The nazification of the speaker"'"s antagonist is a perhaps hyperbolic but crucial feature of the poem. Plath once said to George Macbeth, '"'I see you have a concentration camp in your mind too.'"' For Lady Lazarus, the model of her victimization is the modern slaughter of the Jews. The '"'Nazi lampshade'"' refers to the commandant"'"s practice at Buchwald of flaying inmates and stretching the skin, often tattooed, over a lampshade frame. The most notorious of the Nazi gas chambers and crematories were housed at Auschwitz, where blankets were made of human hair and soap from human fat. Those who emptied the ovens poked in the ashes for hidden gold wedding bands and for gold fillings missed by camp '"'dentists.'"' It was at Auschwitz that the infamous and sadistically curious Doktor Mengele listened to the camp symphony, oversaw experiments on humans, and quizzically dropped in at the ovens. Hence the primal '"'brute'"' becomes '"'Herr Doktor'"' and '"'Herr Enemy.'"' '"'Herr God'"' and '"'Herr Lucifer,'"' two sides of the same coin, are but extensions of the Nazi male stereotype.

To this frame of reference, Plath adds an amusing filmic touch, after the fashion of the '"'vampire'"' and the '"'villagers'"' in her poem '"'Daddy.'"' '"'So, so, Herr Doktor./ So, Herr Enemy'"' parodies the stereotypical speech of Nazi officers interrogating prisoners in American war films of the 1940"'"s. That the words are Lady Lazarus"'" indicates that she is exorcising the victim within her and preparing to adopt her enemy"'"s tactics against him. She had, of course, told her nemesis to '"'Peel off the napkin'"' of her '"'featureless face,'"' the manifestation of her passivity, represented as a '"'Jew linen.'"'

Themes and Meanings
People who return from the edge of death often speak of it as rebirth. '"'Lady Lazarus'"' effectively conveys that feeling. It is principally, however, about the aspiration to revenge that is felt by the female victim of male domination, conceived as ubiquitous. The revenge would be against all men, though the many are rendered as singular in the poem. The text forces the reader to take the father as prototype, which drives one to read it in terms of the Electra complex. Why, one asks, is the speaker malevolent toward the father rather than amorously yearning? What has he done to inspire the hatred which has displaced love?
The poem is mythic. It leaves the father"'"s, the male"'"s, basic offense at the general level of brutal domination. One might rest there, taking control and exploitation as the male"'"s by nature, practiced universally and with special vigor toward spouses and daughters. The idea will come short of universal acceptance, but the text does not disallow it.

If one looks at the '"'Enemy'"' as modeled on Plath"'"s own father, one finds something else, though certainly no Fascist. Otto Plath"'"s blameless offense was his death in Sylvia"'"s childhood, which seems to have left her feeling both guiltily responsible and angry, a common reaction. One normally expects the adult child to overcome this confusion by reasonably understanding it. This poem is not about that experience; it is about the wish, however futile, to turn the tables on the father and his kind. Its dramatic overstatement of male evil may be, for one reader, an offense against fairness. For another, it may not even pertain to that problem, but only represent the extremity of long-borne suffering.

Whether the poem depicts the onset of successful revenge is problematic. Lady Lazarus has surely arrived at the point of reversing roles with her antagonist. She understands and intends to exploit his means of violent mastery, and at the last, the prefatory myth of the halting Lazarus is altered to the myth of the ascendant phoenix, the bird which immolates itself every five hundred years but rises whole and rejuvenated from its ashes. Lady Lazarus"'" '"'red hair'"' suggests fire, which lives (easily) off oxygen. '"'I eat men like air,'"' therefore, seems the foreshadowing of victory, in the restoration of the true self and the annihilation of its detractor(s).

For a person, however, the '"'eating'"' of air is not nourishing; also, Lady Lazarus confronts men in every quarter of the universe, and her battle plan is of their design. She is even nominally male herself. Whether the phoenix is male or female is even uncertain, though Plath preferred to think it female. Perhaps the poem ultimately envisions the tension created in the victim by the wish for revenge and the fear of its frustration.

On "Lady Lazarus"

Robert Phillips

She fears, in "Sheep in Fog," that her search will lead instead to a "starless and fatherless" heaven, carrying her into dark waters. Such dark waters are the subject of "Lady Lazarus," a much-quoted poem in which Plath compares herself to that Biblical figure once resurrected by Christ (and to a cat with its nine lives) because she has been "resurrected" from attempted suicide three times. The poem is also an act of revenge on the male Ego:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

From "The Dark Tunnel: A Reading of Sylvia Plath." Modern Poetry Studies 3.2 (1972).

Eillen M. Aird

A companion piece to 'Daddy', in which the poet again fuses the worlds of personal pain and corporate suffering, is ‘Lady Lazarus'. In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem. The vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech, the frequently end-stopped lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly counteracting the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant note which this poem strives to achieve. These are all devices which also operate in Auden's 'light verse', but the constantly shifting tone of 'Lady Lazarus' is found less frequently in Auden's more cerebral poetry. At times the tone is hysterically strident and demanding:

The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.

Then it modulates into a calmer irony as the persona mocks herself for her pretensions to tragedy: 'Dying/is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well.' As in 'Daddy' Sylvia Plath has used a limited amount of autobiographical detail in this poem; the references to suicide in 'Lady Lazarus’ reflect her own experience. As in 'Daddy’, however, the personal element is subordinate to a much more inclusive dramatic structure, and one answer to those critics who have seen her work as merely confessional is that she used her personal and painful material as a way of entering into and illustrating much wider themes and subjects. In 'Lady Lazarus' the poet again equates her suffering with the experiences of the tortured Jews, she becomes, as a result of the suicide she inflicts on herself, a Jew:

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

The reaction of the crowd who push in with morbid interest to see the saved suicide mimics the attitude of many to the revelations of the concentration camps; there is a brutal insistence on the pain which many apparently manage to see with scientific detachment. ‘Lady Lazarus’ represents an extreme use of the 'light verse' technique. Auden never forced such grotesque material into such an insistently jaunty poem, and the anger and compassion which inform the poem are rarely found so explicitly in his work. 'Lady Lazarus' is also a supreme example of Sylvia Plath's skill as an artist. She takes very personal, painful material and controls and forms it with the utmost rigour into a highly wrought poem, which is partly effective because of the polar opposition between the terrible gaiety of its form and the fiercely uncompromising seriousness of its subject. If we categorize a poem such as 'Lady Lazarus' as 'confessional' or 'extremist’ then we highlight only one of its elements. It is also a poem of social criticism with a strong didactic intent, and a work of art which reveals great technical and intellectual ability. The hysteria is intentional and effective.

From Sylvia Plat: Her Life and Work. Copyright © 1973 by Eileen M. Aird

Margaret Dickie

Plath’s late poems are full of speakers whose rigid identities and violent methods not only parody their torment but also permit them to control it. The peculiar nature of the speaker in "Lady Lazarus" defies ordinary notions of the suicide. Suicide is not the joyous act she claims it to be in her triumphant assertion that she has done it again. Her confidence, at the moment of recovery, that her sour breath will vanish in a day and that she will soon be a smiling woman is a perverse acceptance of her rescuers' hopes, although she calls her rescuers enemies. The impulse of the speaker is the overwhelming desire to control the situation. She is above all a performer, chiefly remarkable for her manipulation of herself as well as of the effects she wishes to have on those who surround her. She speaks of herself in hyperboles, calling herself a "walking miracle," boasting that she has "nine times to die," exclaiming that dying is an art she does "exceptionally well," asserting that "the theatrical/ Comeback in broad day" knocks her out. Her treatment of suicide in such buoyant terms amounts to a parody of her own act. When she compares her suicide to the victimization of the Jews, and when she later claims there is a charge for a piece of her hair or clothes and thus compares her rescued self to the crucified Christ or martyred saint, she is engaging in self-parody. She employs these techniques partly to defy the crowd, with its "brute / Amused shout:/ 'A miracle!' " and partly to taunt her rescuers, "Herr Doktor," "Herr Enemy," who regard her as their "opus." She is neither a miracle nor an opus, and she fends off those who would regard her in this way.

The techniques have another function as well: they display the extent to which she can objectify herself, ritualize her fears, manipulate her own terror. Her extreme control is intimately entwined with her suicidal tendencies. If she is not to succumb to her desire to kill herself and thus control her own fate, she must engage in the elaborate ritual which goes on all the time in the mind of the would-be suicide by which she allays her persistent wish to destroy herself. Her control is not sane but hysterical . When the speaker assures the crowd that she is "the same, identical woman" after her rescue, she is in fact telling them her inmost fear that she could (and probably will) do it again. What the crowd takes for a return to health, the speaker sees as a return to the perilous conditions that have driven her three times to suicide. By making a spectacle out of herself and by locating the victimizer in the doctor and the crowd, rather than in herself, she is casting out her terrors so that she can control them. When she boasts at the end that she will rise and eat men, she is projecting her destruction outward. That last stanza of defiance is really a mental effort to triumph over terror, to rise and not to succumb to her own victimization. The poet behind the poem allows Lady Lazarus to caricature herself and thus to demonstrate the way in which the mind turns ritualistic against horror. Although "Lady Lazarus" draws on Plath's own suicide attempt, the poem tells us little of the actual event. It is not a personal confession, but it does reveal Plath's understanding of the way the suicidal person thinks.

From Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1979 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Arthur Oberg

"Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" are poems which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of imagistic technique. They both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The public horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented identities become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to piles of things. The movement in each poem is at once historical and private; the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent to which this century has often made it impossible to separate them.

The barkerlike tone of "Lady Lazarus" is not accidental. As in "Daddy," the persona strips herself before the reader ... all the time utilizing a cool or slang idiom in order to disguise feeling. Sylvia Plath borrowed from a sideshow or vaudeville world the respect for virtuosity which the performer must acquire, for which the audience pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her work, she admired the virtuosity of the magician's unflinching girl or of the unshaking tattoo artist. Here, in "Lady Lazarus," it is the barker and the striptease artist who consume her attention. What the poet pursues in image and in rhyme (for example, the rhyming of "Jew" and "gobbledygoo") becomes part of the same process I observed in so many of her other poems, that attempt, brilliant and desperate, to locate what it was that hurt.

Sylvia Plath never stopped recording in her poetry the wish and need to clear a space for love. Yet she joined this to an inclination to see love as unreal, to accompanying fears of being unable to give and receive love, and to the eventual distortion and displacement of love in the verse. Loving completely or "wholly" she considered to be dangerous, from her earliest verse on.

[. . . .]

Poems like"Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus’ in the end may not be the triumphs which their momentum and inventiveness at times celebrate. Instead, and this is my sense of them, they belong more to elegy and to death, to the woman whose "loving associations" abandoned her as she sought to create images for them.

From Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley,-and Plath. Rutgers University Press, 1978

Jon Rosenblatt

. . . The poem reflects Plath's recognition at the end of her life that the struggle between self and others and between death and birth must govern every aspect of the poetic structure. The magical and demonic aspects of the world appear in "Lady Lazarus" with an intensity that is absent from "The Stones."

The Lady of the poem is a quasi-mythological figure, a parodic version of the biblical Lazarus whom Christ raised from the dead. As in "The Stones," the speaker undergoes a series of transformations that are registered through image sequences. The result is the total alteration of the physical body. In "Lady Lazarus," however, the transformations are more violent and more various than in "The Stones," and the degree of self-dramatization on the part of the speaker is much greater. Four basic sequences of images define the Lady's identity. At the beginning of the poem, she is cloth or material: lampshade, linen, napkin; in the middle, she is only body: knees, skin and bone, hair; toward the end, she becomes a physical object: gold, ash, a cake of soap; finally, she is resurrected as a red-haired demon. Each of these states is dramatically connected to an observer or observers through direct address: first, to her unnamed "enemy"; then, to the "gentlemen and ladies"; next, to the Herr Doktor; and, finally, to Herr God and Herr Lucifer. The address to these "audiences" allows Plath to characterize Lady Lazarus's fragmented identities with great precision. For example, a passage toward the end of the poem incorporates the transition from a sequence of body images (scars-heart-hair) to a series of physical images" (opus-valuable-gold baby) as it shifts its address from the voyeuristic crowd to the Nazi Doktor:

[lines 61-70]

The inventiveness of the language demonstrates Plath's ability to create, as she could not in "The Stones," an appropriate oral medium for the distorted mental states of the speaker. The sexual pun on "charge" in the first line above; the bastardization of German ("Herr Enemy"); the combination of Latinate diction ("opus," "valuable") and colloquial phrasing ("charge," "So, so . . . ")—all these linguistic elements reveal a character who has been grotesquely split into warring selves. Lady Lazarus is a different person for each of her audiences, and yet none of her identities is bearable for her. For the Nazi Doktor, she is a Jew, whose body must be burned; for the "peanut-crunching crowd," she is a stripteaser; for the medical audience, she is a wonder, whose scars and heartbeat are astonishing; for the religious audience, she is a miraculous figure, whose hair and clothes are as valuable as saints' relics. And when she turns to her audience in the middle of the poem to describe her career in suicide, she becomes a self-conscious performer. Each of her deaths, she says, is done "exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell."

The entire symbolic procedure of death and rebirth in "Lady Lazarus" has been deliberately chosen by the speaker. She enacts her death repeatedly in order to cleanse herse1f of the "million filaments" of guilt and anguish that torment her. After she has returned to the womblike state of being trapped in her cave, like the biblical Lazarus, or of being rocked "shut as a seashell," she expects to emerge reborn in a new form. These attempts at rebirth are unsuccessful until the end of the poem. Only when the Lady undergoes total immolation of self and body does she truly emerge in a demonic form. The doctor burns her down to ash, and then she achieves her rebirth:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Using the phoenix myth of resurrection as a basis, Plath imagines a woman who has become pure spirit rising against the imprisoning others around her: gods, doctor, men, and Nazis. This translation of the self into spirit, after an ordeal of mutilation, torture, and immolation, stamps the poem as the dramatization of the basic initiatory process.

"Lady Lazarus" defines the central aesthetic principles of Plath's late poetry. First, the poem derives its dominant effects from the colloquial language. From the conversational opening ("I have done it again") to the clipped warnings of the ending ("Beware / Beware"), "Lady Lazarus" appears as the monologue of a woman speaking spontaneously out of her pain and psychic disintegration. The Latinate terms ("annihilate," "filaments," "opus," "valuable") are introduced as sudden contrasts to the essentially simple language of the speaker. The obsessive repetition of key words and phrases gives enormous power to the plain style used throughout. As she speaks, Lady Lazarus seems to gather up her energies for an assault on her enemies, and the staccato repetitions of phrases build up the intensity of feelings:

[lines 46-50]

This is language poured out of some burning inner fire, though it retains the rhythmical precision that we expect from a much less intensely felt expression. It is also a language made up almost entirely of monosyllables. Plath has managed to adapt a heightened conversational stance and a colloquial idiom to the dramatic monologue form.

The colloquial language of the poem relates to its second major aspect: its aural quality. "Lady Lazarus" is meant to be read aloud. To heighten the aural effect, the speaker's, voice modulates across varying levels of rhetorical intensity. At one moment she reports on her suicide attempt with no observable emotion:

I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.

The next moment she becomes a barker at a striptease show:

Gentlemen, ladies,
These are my hands.

Then she may break into a kind of incantatory chant that sweeps reality in front of it, as at the very end of the poem. The deliberate rhetoric of the poem marks it as a set-piece, a dramatic tour de force, that must be heard to be truly appreciated. Certainly it answers Plath's desire to create an aural medium for her poetry.

Third, "Lady Lazarus" transforms a traditional stanzaic pattern to obtain its rhetorical and aural effects. One of the striking aspects of Plath's late poetry is its simultaneous dependence on and abandonment of traditional forms. The three-line stanza of "Lady Lazarus" and such poems as "Ariel," "Fever 103°," "Mary's Song," and "Nick and the Candlestick" refer us inevitably to the terza rima of the Italian tradition and to the terza rima experiments of Plath's earlier work. But the poems employ this stanza only as a general framework for a variable-beat line and variable rhyming patterns. The first stanza of the poem has two beats in its first line, three in its second, and two in its third; but the second has a five-three-two pattern. The iambic measure is dominant throughout, though Plath often overloads a line with stressed syllables or reduces a line to a single stress. The rhymes are mainly off-rhymes ("again," "ten"; "fine," "linen"; "stir," "there"). Many of the pure rhymes are used to accentuate a bizarre conjunction of meaning, as in the lines addressed to the doctor: "I turn and burn. / Do not think I underestimate your great concern."

Finally, "Lady Lazarus," like "Daddy" and "Fever 103°," incorporates historical material into the initiatory and imagistic patterns. This element of Plath's method has generated much misunderstanding, including the charge that her use of references to Nazism and to Jewishness is inauthentic. Yet these allusions to historical events form part of the speaker's fragmented identity and allow Plath to portray a kind of eternal victim. The very title of the poem lays the groundwork for a semicomic historical and cultural allusiveness. The Lady is a legendary figure, a sufferer, who has endured almost every variety of torture. Plath can thus include among Lady Lazarus's characteristics the greatest contemporary examples of brutality and persecution: the sadistic medical experiments on the Jew's by Nazi doctors and the Nazis' use of their victims' bodies in the production of lampshades and other objects. These allusions, however, are no more meant to establish a realistic historic norm in the poem than the allusions to the striptease are intended to establish a realistic social context. The references in the poem—biblical, historical, political, personal—draw the reader into the center of a personality and its characteristic mental processes. The reality of the poem lies in the convulsions of the narrating consciousness. The drama of external persecution, self-destructiveness, and renewal, with both its horror and its grotesque comedy, is played out through social and historical contexts that symbolize the inner struggle of Lady Lazarus.

The claim that Plath misuses a particular historical experience is thus incorrect. She shows how a contemporary consciousness is obsessed with historical and personal demons and how that consciousness deals with these figures. The demonic characters of the Nazi Doktor and of the risen Lady Lazarus are surely more central to the poem's tone and intent than is the historicity of these figures. By imagining the initiatory drama against the backdrop of Nazism, Plath is universalizing a personal conflict that is treated more narrowly in such poems as "The Bee-Meeting" and "Berck-Plage." The fact that Plath herself was not Jewish has no bearing on the legitimacy of her employment of the Jewish persona: the holocaust serves her as a metaphor for the death-and-life battle between the self and a deadly enemy. Whether Plath embodies the enemy as a personal friend, a demonic entity, a historical figure, or a cosmic force, she consistently sees warfare in the structural terms of the initiatory scenario. "Lady Lazarus" is simply the most powerful and successful of the dramas in which that enemy appears as the sadistic masculine force of Nazism.

from Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Copyright © 1979 by University of North Carolina Press.

Helen Vendler

"Lady Lazarus," written in the same feverish thirtieth-birthday month that produced "Daddy" and "Ariel," is a mélange of incompatible styles, as though in a meaningless world every style could have its day: bravado ("I have done it again"), slang ("A sort of walking miracle"), perverse fashion commentary ("my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade"), melodrama ("Do I terrify?"), wit ("like the cat I have nine times to die"), boast ("This is Number Three"), self-disgust ("What a trash/To annihilate each decade"). The poem moves on through reductive dismissal ("The big strip tease") to public announcement, with a blasphemous swipe at the ecce homo ("Gentlemen, ladies/These are my hands/My knees"), and comes to its single lyric moment, recalling Plath's suicide attempt in the summer before her senior year at Smith:

I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Almost every stanza of "Lady Lazarus" picks up a new possibility for this theatrical voice, from mock movie talk ("So, so, Herr Doktor./So, Herr Enemy") to bureaucratic politeness, ("Do not think I underestimate your great concern") to witch warnings ("I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air"). When an author makes a sort of headcheese of style in this way--a piece of gristle, a piece of meat, a piece of gelatin, a piece of rind--the disbelief in style is countered by a competitive faith in it. Style (as something consistent) is meaningless, but styles (as dizzying provisional skepticism) are all.

Poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" are in one sense demonically intelligent, in their wanton play with concepts, myths, and language, and in another, and more important, sense not intelligent at all, in that they willfully refuse, for the sale of a cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady, centripetal effect of thought. Instead, they display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to further and further reaches of outrage. They are written in a loud version of what Plath elsewhere calls "the zoo yowl, the mad soft/ Mirror talk you love to catch me at." And that zoo yowl has a feral slyness about it.

From "An Intractable Metal." The New Yorker (1982).

Paul Breslin

"Lady Lazarus," another anthology-piece, reveals that this vacillation has, in addition to its misplaced mimetic function, a rhetorical function as well. This poem, much more overtly than "Daddy," anticipates and manipulates the responses of the reader. The speaker alternately solicits our sympathy and rebukes us for meddling. "Do I terrify?" she asks; she certainly hopes so. By comparing her recovery from a suicide attempt to the resurrection of Lazarus, she imagines herself as the center of a spectacle—we envision Christ performing a miracle before the astonished populace of Bethany. But unlike the beneficiary of the biblical miracle, Plath's "lady Lazarus" accomplishes her own resurrection and acknowledges no power greater than herself. "Herr God; Herr Lucifer, I Beware I Beware," she warns. Her self-aggrandizing gestures invite attention, and yet we are to be ashamed of ourselves if we accept the invitation:

The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip-tease.

The crowd is aggressive ("shoves"), its interest lascivious; it seeks an illicit titillation, if not from the speaker's naked body, then from her naked psyche.

Again, one might argue that the divided tone of "Lady Lazarus" is a legitimately mimetic representation of the psychology of suicide. A suicide attempt is partly motivated by the wish to get attention and exact revenge on those who have withheld attention in the past by making them feel responsible for one's death. Those who attempt suicide in a manner unlikely to succeed—and Plath 's attempts, including the successful one, seem to have been intended to fail—are torn between the desire "to last it out and not come back at all" and the hope that someone will care enough to intervene. Moreover, a suicide attempt is itself a confession, a public admission of inward desperation: Recovering from such an attempt, one would have to contend with the curiosity aroused in other people. One might indeed feel stripped naked, sorry to have called so much attention to oneself, and yet suddenly powerful in commanding so much attention.

Plath's analogy of the strip-tease or the sideshow conveys, with force and precision, the ambivalence of suicidal despair. Had she extended that metaphor through the entire poem, holding its complexities in balance, "Lady Lazarus" might have achieved the stability of tone and judgment lacking in "Daddy." But unfortunately, Plath succumbed to the urge to whip up further lurid excitement with the analogy of the concentration camp, introduced in stanzas two and three but dormant thereafter until it returns at the end of stanza twenty-one. It reenters stealthily:

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart.
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

The first five lines of this passage, which continue the metaphor of strip-tease or freak show, are witty and self-possessed in their bitterness. "Large charge" is of course, slang for "big thrill" and so glances at the titillation the audience receives as well as the price of admission. But with "a bit of blood / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes," we suddenly recall the "Nazi lampshade" of stanza two. The speaker's "enemy"' whether it be Herr God, Herr Lucifer, or the peanut-crunching crowd, would kill her and dismember the body for commodities (or, in the context of biblical miracle, relics; in either case she is martyred). Interestingly, as the irony becomes less controlled, more phantasmagorical and unhinged, the rhythm begins to fall into anapests, and the rhyme on "goes" and "clothes" is one of the most insistent in the poem. The sound of the poetry, reminiscent of light verse, combines strangely with its macabre sense, rather like certain passages in "The Raven" where one feels that Poe has been demonically possessed by W. S. Gilbert ("For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being / Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door").

In the last twenty lines of "Lady Lazarus," irony vanishes, its last glimmer coming ten lines from the end in "Do not think I underestimate your great concern." By this point, the speaker has turned from the crowd to address a single threatening figure:

So, so, Herr Doktor
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable
The pure gold baby. . . .

The enemy, hitherto unspecified, turns out to be a German male authority figure, perhaps a scholar like Otto Plath ("Herr Doktor"), who thinks of the speaker as his "pure gold baby." An inward confrontation with this father imago replaces the confrontation with the intrusive crowd. The poem enters a realm of pure fantasy as the "Herr Doktor" rapidly assumes the cosmic proportions of "Herr God, Herr Lucifer." There is also a shift in the figurative language, corresponding to the shift in tone and implied audience. The clammy imagery of "the grave cave" and "worms . . . like sticky pearls" gives way to an imagery of death by fire. The resurrection of Lazarus becomes the birth of the Phoenix, and the extended metaphor of a public spectacle abruptly disappears. The threat of the final line, "And I eat men like air" (SP, 247), has little connection with anything in the first twenty-one stanzas.

As with "Daddy," one may try to save consistency by declaring the speaker a "persona." The poem, by this reckoning, reveals a woman gradually caught up in her anger and carried by it toward a recognition of its true object: not the crowd of insensitive onlookers, but the father and husband who have driven her to attempt suicide. The end of the poem, thus understood, breaks free of defensive irony to release cathartic rage. But it is hard to see why this rage is cathartic, since it no sooner locates its "real" object than it begins to convert reality back into fantasy again, in a grandiose and finally evasive fashion. Was it that Plath unconsciously doubted her right to be angry and therefore had to convict her father and her husband of Hitlerian monstrosities in order to justify the anger she nonetheless felt? Or did she fear that the experiential grounds of her emotions were too personal for art unless mounted on the stilts of myth or psycho-historical analogy? On such questions one can only speculate, and the answers, even if they were obtainable, could illuminate the poems only as biographical evidence, not as poems.

from The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by the U of Chicago P.

Kathleen Margaret Lant

"Purdah" and "Lady Lazarus" - written within a week of each other during October 1962 - further reveal Plath's conviction that undressing has become for her a powerful poetic gesture, and in these poems it is the female speaker who finally disrobes - and here she attempts to appropriate the power of nakedness for herself. Plath does not simply contemplate from the spectator's point of view the horrors and the vigor of the act of undressing; now her female subject dares to make herself naked, and she does so in an attempt to make herself mighty. At this point, nakedness has somehow become strongly assertive, at least at one level in these poems. "Purdah" and "Lady Lazarus" take up the power of the uncovered body that Plath began to explore in "A Birthday Present." But in these two later poems, that figurative nakedness is compromised by the metaphorical significance of the female body. The naked force in "A Birthday Present" is ultimately masculine since it has the potential to enter the speaker like a cruelly sharp knife; the body that is unclothed encodes the assertiveness of the revealed male body. The body made bare in "Lady Lazarus" and "Purdah," however, is female, and for that reason the power of that body's undraping must be - at least in terms of Plath's metaphorical universe - necessarily diminished.

[. . . . ]

"Lady Lazarus" conveys the same sense of confusion or ambivalence in that the power of the speaking subject of the poem seems undermined by the melodramatic unclothing of that subject. Lady Lazarus is clearly - like the speaker of "Purdah" - meant to threaten; she asks rather sarcastically, "Do I terrify?", but the language by means of which she shapes her unclothing seems to compromise the grandeur of her act. She is not covered by grime or grit or falseness; her covering is somehow already too feminine, too ineffectual: My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen. // Peel off the napkin" (244). "Lady Lazarus" presents most clearly one of the central problems with Plath's use of the metaphor of nakedness, for in this poem Plath refers to this act of unclothing as "The big strip tease." And in this act, no woman is terrifying, no woman is triumphant, no woman is powerful, for she offers herself to "the peanut-crunching crowd" in a gesture that is "theatrical" (245) rather than self-defining, designed to please or to appease her viewers more than to release herself.

To strip is to seduce; it is not to assert oneself sexually or psychologically. And by the end of the poem, the speaker seeks to shame the male viewer who is exploiting her; she threatens him openly: "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air" (247). But the threat is empty. Alicia Ostriker observes, too, that the rage here is "hollow" because the reader is fully aware that the speaker of this poem "is powerless, she knows it, she hates it" (102). But Ostriker does not name the source of this powerlessness - the speaker's physical vulnerability. The female subject has offered here pieces of herself, she has displayed herself not in an assertive way but in a sexually provocative and seductive way, and - at the very end - she resorts to descriptions of her appearance - her red hair - but not delineations of her reality - her anger. She does not convince the audience that she is, in fact, dangerous, for she must offer the female body as an object rather than assert it as a weapon. It is telling, too, that the speaker's audience in "Lady Lazarus" is made up entirely of men (Herr God, Herr Lucifer, Herr Doktor), for by revealing herself only before such an audience, she ensures that her unveiling will be read not as a powerful assertion of identity but rather as a seductive gesture of submission and invitation.

from "The big strip tease: female bodies and male power in the poetry of Sylvia Plath." Contemporary Literature 34.4 (Winter 1993)

Al Strangeways

In "Lady Lazarus," for example, Plath collapses the "them and us" distinction by confronting readers with their voyeurism in looking at the subject of the poem. To apply Teresa De Lauretis's theorizing of the cinematic positioning of women to Plath's poem, in "Lady Lazarus," the speaker's consciousness of her performance for the readers (who are implicitly part of the "peanut-crunching crowd") works to reverse the gaze of the readers so that they become "overlooked in the act of overlooking."

By extension, in her parodic overstatement (Lady Lazarus as archetypal victim, archetypal object of the gaze) Plath highlights the performative (that is, constructed rather than essential) nature of the speaker's positioning as object of the gaze, and so (to extend Judith Butler's terms), Lady Lazarus enacts a performance that attempts to "compel a reconsideration of the place and stability" of her positioning, and to "enact and reveal the performativity" of her representation. This sense of performativity and the reversal of gaze likewise extends, in "Lady Lazarus," to compel reconsideration not only of the conventional positioning of the woman as object, and of the voyeurism implicit in all lyric poetry, but also of the historical metaphors as objects of the gaze. Readers feel implicated in the poem's straightforward assignment and metaphorizing of the speaker in her role as object and performer, and contingently are made to feel uncomfortable about their similar easy assimilation of the imagery (of the suffering of the Jews) that the speaker uses. In "Daddy," a similar relationship between reader, speaker, and metaphor is at work.

From "’Boot in the Face’: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath." Contemporary Literature 37.3 (Fall 1996).

Christina Britzolakis

Although Plath's 'confessional' tropes are often seen in terms of a Romantic parable of victimization, whether of the sensitive poetic individual crushed by a brutally rationalized society, or of feminist protest against a monolithic patriarchal oppressor, her self-reflexivity tends to turn confession into a parody gesture or a premiss for theatrical performance. The central instance of the 'confessional' in her writing is usually taken to be 'Lady Lazarus'. M. L. Rosenthal uses the poem to validate the generic category: 'Robert Lowell's 'Skunk Hour' and Sylvia Plath's 'Lady Lazarus' are true examples of 'confessional' poetry because they put the speaker himself at the centre of the poem in such a way as to make his psychological shame and vulnerability an embodiment of his civilization.' The confessional reading of the poem is usually underpinned by the recourse to biography, which correlates the speaker's cultivation of the 'art of dying' with Plath's suicidal career. Although Plath is indeed, at one level, mythologizing her personal history, the motif of suicide in 'Lady Lazarus' operates less as self-revelation than as a theatrical tour de force, a music-hall routine.

With 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' is probably the single text in the Plath canon which has attracted most disapproval on the grounds of a manipulative, sensationalist, or irresponsible style. Helen Vendler, for example, writes that 'Style (as something consistent) is meaningless, but styles (as dizzying provisional scepticism) are all . . . Poems like 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' are in one sense demonically intelligent, in their wanton play with concepts, myths and language, and in another, and more important, sense, not intelligent at all, in that they wilfully refuse, for the sake of a cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady, centripetal effect of thought. Instead, they display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to further and further reaches of outrage.' Here, the element of 'wilful' pastiche in 'Lady Lazarus' is measured against a normative ideal of aesthetic detachment. Yet the poem's ironic use of prostitution as the figure of a particular kind of theatricalized self-consciousness—of the poet as, in Plath's phrase, 'Roget's trollop, parading words and tossing off bravado for an audience' (JP 2I4)—calls for a reading which takes seriously what the poem does with, and to, literary history.

Like 'Lesbos', 'Lady Lazarus' is a dramatic monologue which echoes and parodies 'The Love Song of J. AIfred Prufrock'. The title alludes, of course, not only to the biblical story of Lazarus but also to Prufrock's lines: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,  | Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'. Like Eliot, Plath uses clothing as a metaphor for rhetoric: the 'veil' or 'garment' of style. By contrast with Eliot's tentative hesitations, obliquities, and evasions of direct statement, however, Plath's poem professes to 'tell all'. Lady Lazarus deploys a patently alienated and manufactured language, in which the shock tactic, the easy effect, reign supreme. Her rhetoric is one of direct statement ('I have done it again'), of brutal Americanisms ('trash', 'shoves', 'the big strip tease', 'I do it so it feels like hell', 'knocks me out'), of glib categorical assertions and dismissals ('Dying is an art, like everything else') , and blatant internal rhymes ('grave cave', 'turn and burn'). As Richard Blessing remarks, both 'Lady Lazarus' and 'The Applicant' are poems that parody advertising techniques while simultaneously advertising themselves. The poet who reveals her suffering plays to an audience, or 'peanut-crunching crowd'; her miraculous rebirths are governed by the logic of the commodity. Prufrock is verbally overdressed but feels emotionally naked and exposed, representing himself as crucified before the gaze of the vulgar mass. Lady Lazarus, on the other hand, incarnates the 'holy prostitution of the soul' which Baudelaire found in the experience of being part of a crowd; emotional nakedness is itself revealed as a masquerade. The 'strip-tease' artist is a parodic, feminized version of the symbolist poet sacrificed to an uncomprehending mass audience. For Baudelaire, as Walter Benjamin argues, the prostitute serves as an allegory of the fate of aesthetic experience in modernity, of its 'prostitution' to mass culture. The prostitute deprives femininity of its aura, its religious and cultic presence; the woman's body becomes a commodity, made up of dead and petrified fragments, while her beauty becomes a matter of cosmetic disguise (make-up and fashion). Baudelaire's prostitute sells the appearance of femininity. But she also offers a degraded and hallucinated memory of fulfilment, an intoxicating or narcotic substitute for the idealized maternal body. For the melancholic, spleen-ridden psyche, which obsessively dwells on the broken pieces of the past, she is therefore a privileged object of meditation. She represents the loss of that blissful unity with nature and God which was traditionally anchored in a female figure. Instead, Benjamin argues, the prostitute, like commodity fetishism, harnesses the 'sex-appeal of the inorganic', which binds the living body to the realm of death.

Lady Lazarus is an allegorical figure, constructed from past and present images of femininity, congealed fantasies projected upon the poem's surface. She is a pastiche of the numerous deathly or demonic women of poetic tradition, such as Foe's Ligeia, who dies and is gruesomely revivified through the corpse of another woman. Ligeia's function, which is to be a symbol, mediating between the poet and 'supernal beauty', can only be preserved by her death. Similarly, in Mallarme's prose poem 'Le Phenomene Futur', the 'Woman of the Past' is scientifically preserved and displayed at a circus sideshow by the poet. For Plath, however, the woman on show, the 'female phenomenon' is a revelation of unnaturalness instead of sensuous nature, her body gruesomely refashioned into Nazi artefacts. Lady Lazarus yokes together the canonical post-Romantic, symbolist tradition which culminates in 'Prufrock', and the trash culture of True Confessions, through their common concern with the fantasizing and staging of the female body:

I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

The densely layered intertextual ironies at work in these lines plot the labyrinthine course of what Benjamin calls 'the sex appeal of the inorganic' through literary history. They echo Ariel's song in The Tempest, whose talismanic status in Plath's writing I have already noted. Plath regenders the image, substituting Lady Lazarus for the drowned corpse of the father/king. The metaphor of the seashell converts the female body into a hardened, dead and inorganic object, but at the same time nostalgically recalls the maternal fecundity of the sea. The dead woman who suffers a sea change is adorned with phallic worms turned into pearls, the 'sticky', fetishistic sublimates of male desire. In Marvell's poem of seduction, 'To His Coy Mistress', the beloved is imagined as a decaying corpse: 'Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound | My echoing song: then worms shall try | That long-preserved virginity: | And your quaint honour turn to dust; | And into ashes all my lust.' In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the refrain 'Those are pearls that were his eyes' is associated with the drowned Phoenician sailor, implicit victim of witch-like, neurotic, or soul-destroying female figures, such as Madame Sosostris and Cleopatra.

Lady Lazarus stages the spectacle of herself, assuming the familiar threefold guise of actress, prostitute, and mechanical woman. The myth of the eternally recurring feminine finds its fulfilment in the worship and 'martyrdom' of the film or pop star, a cult vehicle of male fantasy who induces mass hysteria and vampiric hunger for 'confessional' revelations. Lady Lazarus reminds her audience that 'there is a charge, a very large charge | For a word or a touch | Or a bit of blood | Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.' It is as if Plath is using the Marilyn Monroe figure to travesty Poe's dictum in 'The Philosophy of Composition' (I846) that 'the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world'. The proliferation of intertextual ironies also affects the concluding transformation of 'Lady Lazarus' into the phoenix-like, man-eating demon, who rises 'out of the ash' with her 'red hair'. This echoes Coleridge's description of the possessed poet in 'Kubla Kahn': 'And all should cry Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!' The woman's hair, a privileged fetish-object of male fantasy, becomes at once a badge of daemonic genius and a flag of vengeance. It is tempting to read these lines as a personal myth of rebirth, a triumphant Romantic emergence of what Lynda Bundtzen calls the female 'body of imagination'. The myth of the transcendent-demonic phoenix seems to transcend the dualism of male-created images of women, wreaking revenge on 'Herr Doktor', 'Herr God', and 'Herr Lucifer', those allegorical emblems of an oppressive masculinity. Yet Lady Lazarus's culminating assertion of power—'I eat men like air'—undoes itself, through its suggestion of a mere conjuring trick. The attack on patriarchy is undercut by the illusionistic character of this apotheosis which purports to transform, at a stroke, a degraded and catastrophic reality. What the poem sarcastically 'confesses', through its collage of fragments of 'high' and 'low' culture, is a commodity status no longer veiled by the aura of the sacred. Lyric inwardness is 'prostituted' to the sensationalism of 'true confession'. The poet can no longer cherish the illusion of withdrawing into a pure, uncontaminated private space, whose immunity from larger historical conflicts is guaranteed by the 'auratic' woman. . . .for Plath the female body, far from serving as expiatory metaphor for the ravages of modernity, itself becomes a sign whose cultural meanings are in crisis.

from Sylvia Plath and Theatre of Mourning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by Christina Bitzolkais

Susan Gubar

[NB. Prosopopoeia: a rhetorical figure involving the adoption of the voices of the imagined, absent dead.]

If identification with the victims who could not disidentify with their tormentors constitutes the trap of prosopopoeia in "Daddy," the trope functions as a trip in "Lady Lazarus." What does it mean to think of the imperilled Jews as—to borrow a phrase Maurice Blanchot used to approach the complex subject of Holocaust-related suicides—fetishized "masters of un-mastery"? The wronged speaker here can only liberate herself from "Herr Doktor" or "Herr Enemy" by wresting the power of persecution from him and turning it against herself. We know that the ongoingness of the torments of the Shoah perpetuated postwar suicides, but did those casualties mutate into mystic scapegoats whose envied status as paradigmatic victims would in turn generate ersatz survivor-celebrities? This is one way to grasp the shock of "Lady Lazarus," for the narcissistic and masochistic speaker has become obsessed with dying, relates to it as "a call." With her skin "Bright as a Nazi lampshade," her foot "A paperweight," and her face "featureless, fine / Jew linen," Lady Lazarus puts her damage on theatrical display through her scandalous suicide artistry (244). Have Jews been made to perform the Trauerspiel for a "peanut-crunching crowd" at the movies and on TV, like the striptease entertainer through whom Plath speaks? Does Lady Lazarus's "charge" at making death feel "real" and at "the theatrical / / Comeback" anticipate a contemporary theatricalization of the Holocaust? Certainly, her vengeful warning that "there is a charge / for the hearing of my heart" evokes the charge—the cheap thrill and the financial price and the emotional cost—of installations, novels, testimonials, college courses, critical essays, and museums dedicated to the six million.

The commodification of Lady Lazarus's exhibitionism issues in spectators paying "For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood / / Or a piece of my hair or my clothes"; she brags about her expertise at the art of dying: "I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real" (245, emphasis mine). The spectacular quality of Plath's figure adumbrates the notorious celebrity of a writer like Benjamin Wilkomirski, whose gruesome bestseller Fragments (about a child's experiences in the camps) was praised as "free of literary artifice of any kind" before it was judged to be a fraud. In remarks that gloss Plath's suicide-performer's pandering to her audience, Daniel Ganzfried argued that Wilkomirski's suicide would be read as an authentication of his identity as a victim: "These people talking about suicide will suggest it to him. . . . Some of his supporters would love him dead because then it looks like proof that he's Wilkomirski." Plath's poetry broods upon—just as Ganzfried's argument reiterates—the contamination of the very idea of the genuine. As Blanchot cautions, " If there is, among all words, one that is inauthentic, then surely it is the word 'authentic."' To the extent that the impresario of Plath's stage, "Herr God" / "Herr Lucifer," has reduced Lady Lazarus from a person to an "opus" or a "valuable," the poem hints that even reverential post-Shoah remembrances may be always-already defiled by the Nazi perpetrators—that prosopopoeia will not enable the poet to transcend the tarnished uses to which the past has been, can be, will be put. In the voice of a denizen of disaster, Plath mocks the frisson stimulated by the cultural industry she herself helped to spawn.

Revolted by her own dehumanization, Lady Lazarus then imagines triumphing over the murderous Nazis by turning vengeful herself, if only in the incendiary afterlife conferred by the oven:

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God. Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

As it feeds on "men like air"—predatory psychic dictators but also perhaps men turned to smoke—the red rage that rises out of the ashes only fuels self-combustion, debunking the idea of transcendence or rebirth at the end of the poem. With its ironic echo of the conclusion of Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn"—"Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair"—"Lady Lazarus" repudiates Romantic wonder at the power of the artist, replacing the magical "pleasure dome" of his artifice with the detritus to which the Jewish people were reduced. The poem's speech act amounts to a caustic assessment of the aesthetic sellout, the disaster-imposter luminary: "there is nothing there—." That no consensus exists among contemporary historians over whether the Nazis made cakes of soap out of their victims (though they certainly did "manufacture" hair and skin, rings and fillings and bones) drives home the bitter irony that propels the poem, namely that imaginative approaches to the Shoah may distort, rather than safeguard, the dreadful but shredded historical record. Reenactments of the calamity, including her own, are indicted, even as Plath issues a warning that they will take their toll.

Will the figure of prosopopoeia, so seductive for poets from Jarrell and Plath to Simic and Rich, outlive its functions as the Holocaust and its atrocities recede into a past to which no one alive can provide firsthand testimony? Or will the imperatives of "post-memory" imbue this rhetorical strategy—which insists on returning to the unbearable rupture of suffering—with newfound resonance once the Shoah can no longer be personally recalled? Given the passage of time as well as the flood of depictions of the catastrophe, the very vacuity of the desecrated (buried alive, incinerated, unburied, dismembered) bodies that licensed the personifications of prosopopoeia may make verse epitaphs seem shoddily inadequate. Plath's taunting sneer—"I turn and burn. / Do not think I underestimate your great concern" (246)—chronologically preceded the highly profitable entertainment industry the Holocaust business has so recently become. However, besides forecasting it, "Lady Lazarus" offers up a chilling warning about the fetishization of suffering with which the figure of prosopopoeia flirts. Indeed, Plath's verse uncannily stages the bases for accusations of exploitation, larceny, masochism, and sensationalism that would increasingly accrue around Holocaust remembrance. In addition, her impersonation of the real victims invariably generates awareness of the spurious representation put in the place of the absence of evidence. Calling attention to what Geoffrey Hartman and Jean Baudrillard term our propensity to adopt a "necrospective," poems deploying prosopopoeia draw us closer to an event that is, simultaneously, distanced by their debased status as merely simulated and recycled image-substitutions.

from "Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries." Yale Journal of Criticism (2001)

sylvia plath

Ariel

“Suicidal, at one with the drive / Into the red”  (lines 29:30)

“The posthumous Ariel collection, published by Hughes in 1965, does not follow Plath’s intended sequence; it omits what Huges called ‘some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962’ and includes the dozen or so poems Plath wrote in the months before her death and which she had envisioned as the beginnings of a third book.  Nonetheless, the powerful, angry poems of Ariel, mining a limited range of deep feeling, are Plath’s best known work” (2968).

sylvia plath

Daddy

It tends to be the trend for women who have had traumatic childhoods to be attracted to men who epitomize their emptiness felt as children. Women who have had unaffectionate or absent fathers, adulterous husbands or boyfriends, or relatives who molested them seem to become involved in relationships with men who, instead of being the opposite of the “monsters” in their lives, are the exact replicas of these ugly men. Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” is a perfect example of this unfortunate trend. In this poem, she speaks directly to her dead father and her husband who has been cheating on her, as the poem so indicates. The first two stanzas, lines 1-10, tell the readers that Plath, for thirty years, has been afraid of her father, so scared that she dares not to “breathe or Achoo.” She has been living in fear, although she announces that he’s already dead. It is obvious that she believes that her father continues to control her life from the grave. She says that she “has had to kill” him, but he’s already dead, indicating her initial promise to forget him. She calls him a “bag full of God,” telling us that she considers her father a very strong, omnipotent being, someone who is superior in her eyes. In the middle of the poem, she begins to refer to herself as a Jew, and her father the German, who began “chuffing me off like a Jew…to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belson.” What Plath’s intent here is to allow us to understand that her father was a German, and she relates his behavior as a person to a Nazi. But later, she becomes more enraged, and strips the title of God from her father, and labels him a swastika and a brute. “Every woman adores a Fascist” is Plath’s way of describing her feelings toward her father, since he was German. It also explains that women tend to fall into that tragic sequence where an absent father or a brutal father is the reason women attract violent men – “…the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you.” In stanza 11, we begin to see Plath calling up memories of her father in photographs, and she now refers to him as a devil. In stanza 12, she tells us that he has “bit her pretty red heart in two.” Next, she states that he died when she was ten, and when she was twenty years old, she attempted suicide - “…I tried to die, to get back back back to you.” In stanza 13 is where she starts talking about her husband. She says that instead of dying, her friends “stuck her together with glue,” and since she could not die to get back to her father, she would marry someone who was similar. “I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look For a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do.” These lines are frightening, but unfortunately real. Plath tells us that she has married someone exactly like her father, a man who has a “my struggle” look, a German look. The third line above seems to mean that her husband, who was poet Ted Hughes, cheated on her, in turn abandoning her. But she still said “I do” and agreed to be with him. The last two stanzas are the darkest, and ultimately appear to put some type of closure on Plath’s life. She obviously believes that she killed her father when she was ten years old, stating that “if I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two.” When parents die, and a child is very young, the child will often believe it to be his or her fault, because children cannot grasp the concept of death or the fact that a parent has left them. Therefore, it is apparent that Plath thinks she killed her father at ten, and is now killing her husband, because he has been cheating on her. She refers to her husband as a vampire, who has “drank my blood for a year, seven years, if you want to know.” Plath considers her husband to be the vampire version of her father, coming back to life to torture her and “drink” her life away. But in the last stanza, it seems obvious that Plath has come to a realization. She tells her father to “lie back now” because “there’s a stake in your fat black heart” letting us know that she will be “killing” the vampire version of him; she will be ending her relationship with her husband, and will finally be free from her father’s torture. Plath tells us that “the villagers never liked you” and that “they always knew it was you.” This is saying that everyone around her knew that her father and her husband were monsters in her life, destroying her, but that she has just noticed. “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” is the last line in the poem. It is not until the end that we realize that not only is she through with the memories of her dead father and the adulterous behavior of her husband, but she is through with herself. This last line is clear – Plath has just announced to her readers that she will be committing suicide again, and plans on being successful at it. So, instead of this poem being Plath’s victorious confession to the horrible men in her life, and finally allowing closure, the poem is an outline of her promising death. Plath is still pained by these men, and cannot completely go on being alive. She believes that death is her only solution, and maybe in a way it was. Perhaps she is finally free, and finally able to “breath” and “Achoo.”

Images of victimization in Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" - of Nazis, swastikas, barbed wire, fascists, brutes, devils, and vampires - are so frantic, imposing, and vituperative that the poem seems more out of control than it actually is. When read rapidly and angrily, without ample attention paid to its many unexpected pauses, Plath's poem, indeed, seems like a runaway train barreling through one psychic nightmare after the other, until the speaker pulls the emergency cord that irrevocably separates the self from the tormenting other in the very last line: "Daddy, daddy, ...

Allegory in Plath’s Daddy  

In her poem "Daddy", Plath artfully intermixes the "factually" true with the "emotionally" true. There are scraps of her own life here, but the poem is much bigger than that, and goes beyond the face-value interpretation that is it nothing but a self-indulgent literary vengeance spree. Daddy works on both a biographical/personal level for Plath, but also on an allegorical level as well.

I see this poem as a dual testament to Plath's (and all women's) struggle against male power, authority, influence, etc. She never "had time" to define her feminine self in opposition to her father, in the context of this male relationship, or legitimately break free of it, because of his untimely death. She first resented his being emotionally absent in her life, and then physically absent. In her journals she admits how she struggles in her relationships with men because of this lack. Accounts by both Plath and Aurelia, assert that her father was quite the stereotypical authoritarian male, and although she loved him, she came to hate what he represented and how he had treated Aurelia and her. Many women of that time, (and all times) can understand this dynamic---loving men, but hating how they treat us and view us and exploit us--- consciously or unconsciously, on either a personal, or societal level.

Taken from this perspective, the Holocaust/victim analogy takes on a whole different slant. Rather than referring (exploitatively) to the personal sufferings of one individual woman, it can allegorically represent the mass, historical victimization of women by patriarchy, which has been well-documented (witch hysteria) and which continues (female circumscision) She says "every woman adores a Fascist in boots"--all women in some way participate (if only in their passivity, in refusing to reject the roles that society attempts to force upon them) in this social and cultural situation.

The child-voice of the poem can represent,on a deeper level, that innocence young girls lose as they become women and find themselves being "chuffed off like a Jew," often reluctantly or unknowingly, into the expected roles for women in marriage and childbearing---when fairy tale expectations of love crash into the reality of the Sisyphian tasks of dishes, cooking,cleaning,laundry, child care, when so many women have their dreams and identities erased under the daily grind of domesticity---a different sort of confinement, slavery, suppression, another and altogether different kind of death and destruction of the spirit. Remember Adlai Stevenson's speech at Plath's commencement?

I think that this poem is more than "voodoo." It explores the pain women feel in their various relations to and with men. It is the cry is an injured, abandoned daughter, but it also possesses the undersong cry of all women who have been abandoned emotionally or physically by the men they love. It is a personal rebellion against her father and Hughes, but it also rebels against society, against patriarchy, self-hatred, and women's silence.

Allen Ginsburg

Howl

It is difficult to read Allen Ginsberg's poem _Howl_ in 1994, without

recognizing the influence it had on a society that was moving towards a

banal and materialistic existence.  This poem has made great progress

since its controversial beginnings in the 1950s, and has made its way into

anthologies and classrooms not only in the United States, but all over

the world.  _Howl and Other Poems_ has sold 745,000 copies making it one

of the most read poetry books of it's time.  (Miles 105)

          Allen Ginsberg has become synonomous with the Beat Generation, a group

who coined the term anti-establishment and set the stage for the peace

movement of the 1960s.  In 1959 "Life" magazine did an article about the

"Beat Generation" which, as the story goes, made the beats celebrities

by bringing them into the spotlight. Paul O'Neil writes in the article, 

"No Beat work has so startled the public or so influenced the Beat mind

as Ginsberg's long poem, _Howl_, an expression of wild personal

dissatisfaction with the world."  (O'Neil 119)

_Howl_ broke away not only from poetic literary traditions, but also from

the constraints of the "silent generation."  It was as if Ginsberg's

_Howl_ was meant to be heard by everyone,-- including the society that it

criticized.  The public was not startled by what Ginsberg was saying in

the poem, as much as by the words that he chose in saying it.  The public

obscenity trial pushed _Howl_ into mainstream popular culture, and changed

the way people read and thought about poetry.

          Although the media's fascination with _Howl_ made it a success

with the general public, the literary critics were not so taken by it.  In

_The Partisan Review_, John Hollander states, in regards to _Howl and

Other Poems_,  "It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg...to remark on the

utter lack of decorum of any kind in his dreadful little volume (Miles

161). Many critics felt that breaking away from the traditional forms of

poetry meant that it could not be taken seriously.

          It wasn't until the sixties and seventies that _Howl_ broke through the

literary resistance and became viewed as one of the great poems of modern

American poetry.  By this time _Howl_ was no longer media hype and

critics decided to look at the special qualities that made it an original

and extraordinary poem.  In "How I Hear Howl", George Bowering explicates

the poem, and discusses how the three parts are constructed in such a way

as to revolve around the central unifying theme of the modern day

Moloch.  The Moloch represents the modern day monster which is symbolic

of Time. "Section 1 of "Howl" shows portraits of people the poet knows,

caught in the eye of Time" ( Bowering 372) "At the same time the martyrs

demonstrate against the other oppressions, money & academy, prisons where

not criminals but children are locked up, bent, warped, and trained to pass

thru the sacrifice fires of Moloch (373).

          Critics like Paul Portuges and John Tytell also made contributions

to the literary study of Allen Ginsberg and _Howl_.  Portuges discusses in

his book "visionary poetics" and the impact that Blake's vision has had on

Ginsberg's work.  He says, "(Howl) was indeed a surprise to many,

and a threat to many more.  Ginsberg had fully realized his quest to get

right into the terror.  The individual, victimized by the repression,

fear, and violence that so permeates Western Culture, had surfaced as one

of Ginsberg's major themes."(Portuges 46) This is symbolic of the change

in attitude about _Howl_ in the 1970s.  It was no longer perceived as a

"wildly personal disillusionment"  but was a very real and truthful vision

of what America had become.

          In "Out of the Vietnam Vortex", James Mermann recognizes "Howl" as an

anti-war poem, and states, "It is readily clear that Ginsberg has no

specific war in mind except the inevitable one that must come again and

again to the culture that he describes; and it is clear that he sees the

daily experience of living in that ambiance as a war against the

spirit."(Mersmann 56) Although it is obvious that _Howl_ is dependent on

the zeitgest, it is interesting to see the poem fit in to each decade

over and over again.

          The interest and close analysis of _Howl_ seemed to get lost in

the eighties, however, with the emphasis moving toward theoretical

studies. In Marjorie Perloff's book _Poetic Lisence_, she points out

that,  "Charles Alteri's Enlarging the Temple, Hugh Kenner's A Homemade

World, and Robert von Hallberg's American Poetry and Culture, have tended

to ignore, if not depreciate, Ginsberg's achievement, partly, perhaps, in

reaction to the journalistic overkill devoted to the Beat Generation."

(Perloff 201) Mark Jarman states in the Hudson Review that (Ginsberg's)

poetry, that is to say, is judged thematically, and since the "themes" are

now passŽ, so is much of Ginsberg's work." (224) But Arthur and Kit Knight

argue that the eighties were a time when people needed to be particularly

retrospective, since, "the complacency and the totalitarian atmosphere

that characterized much of the fifties is again with us." (Knight, cover)

In their book Beat Vision, they discuss the importance of "Beat

Generation" and how it must be given the literary credit that it deserves.

I think one thing that many critics overlook is the humorous aspect of

_Howl_.  Ginsberg states, "You're free to say any damn thing you want; but

people are so scared of hearing you say what's unconsciously universal

that it's comical." (Hyde 53)

Amiri Baraka

Dutchman

An Agony

A Poem for Willie Best

Will They Cry When You’re Gone, You Bet

IMPORTANT TO TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE FOLLOWING PAPER QUESTIONS (because he chose to ask about works that we did not use in our papers on the first exam):

1.                 Discuss the use of “soil” or “land” in Cane by Jean Toomer, Blood on the Forge by William Attaway, or “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” by Richard Wright.

2.                 Discuss the ways in which social class complicates race in any one text read in the second half of the course.

3.                 Explicate one of Langston Hughes’s or Claude McKay’s poems.  Show how the poem illustrates the poet’s theory of poetry in its use of vernacular, Jazz, social class.  How is the poem uniquely modernist?

4.                 Discuss the implicit image of the United States presented in any one of

the Hughes poems.  How does this image contribute to your understanding of

Modernism?

5.                 How does it feel to be colored like Zora Neale Hurston?  Discuss her text as presenting both a social and political position in the black community.  What do you understand the text to ultimately be say?  

A Chronology of Important Events and Publications During the Harlem Renaissance

http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/Chap9/9intro.html

1919

• 369th Regiment marched up Fifth Avenue to Harlem, February 17.
• First Pan African Congress organized by W.E.B. Du Bois, Paris, February.
• Race riots in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charleston, Knoxville, Omaha, and elsewhere, June to September.
• Race Relations Commission founded, September.
• Marcus Garvey founded the Black Star Shipping Line.
• Benjamin Brawley published The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States.

1920

• Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) Convention held at Madison Square Garden, August.
• Charles Gilpin starred in Eugene O'Neill, The Emperor Jones, November.
• James Weldon Johnson, first black officer (secretary) of NAACP appointed.
• Claude McKay published Spring in New Hampshire.
• Du Bois's Darkwater is published.
• O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, starring Charles Gilpin, opens at the Provincetown Playhouse.

1921

• Shuffle Along by Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, the first musical revue written and performed by African Americans (cast members include Josephine Baker and Florence Mills), opened, May 22, at Broadway's David Belasco Theater.
• Marcus Garvey founded African Orthodox Church, September.
• Second Pan African Congress.
• Colored Players Guild of New York founded.
• Benjamin Brawley published Social History of the American Negro.

1922

• First Anti-Lynching legislation approved by House of Representatives.
• Publications of The Book of American Negro Poetry edited by James Weldon Johnson; Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows.

1923

• Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life is founded by the National Urban League, with Charles S. Johnson as its editor.
• National Ethiopian Art Players staged The Chip Woman's Fortune by Willis Richardson, first serious play by a black writer on Broadway, May.
• Claude McKay spoke at the Fourth Congress of the Third International in Moscow, June.
• The Cotton Club opened, Fall.
• Marcus Garvey arrested for mail fraud and sentenced to five years in prison.
• Third Pan African Congress.
• Publications of Jean Toomer, Cane; Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinion of Marcus Garvey. 2 vols.

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1924

• Civic Club Dinner, sponsored by Opportunity, bringing black writers and white publishers together, March 21. This event is considered the formal launching of of the New Negro movement.
• Paul Robeson starred in O'Neill's All God's Chillun Got Wings, May 15.
• Countee Cullen won first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry Competition.
• Publications of Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk; Jessie Fauset, There is Confusion; Marcus Garvey, Aims and Objects for a Solution of the Negro Problem Outlined; Walter White, The Fire in the Flint.

1925

• Survey Graphic issue, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro," edited by Alain Locke and Charles Johnson, devoted entirely to black arts and letters, March.
• American Negro Labor Congress held in Chicago, October.
• Opportunity holds its first literary awards dinner; winners include Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.
• The first Crisis awards ceremony is held at the Renaissance Casino; Countee Cullen wins first prize.
• Publications of Cullen, Color; Du Bose Heyward, Porgy; James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, eds. The Book of American Negro Spirituals; Alain Locke, The New Negro; Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter (a novel showing Black life).

1926

• Countee Cullen becomes Assistant Editor of Opportunity; begins to write a regular column "The Dark Tower."
• Savoy Ballroom opened in Harlem, March.
• Publications of Wallace Thurman, Fire!!; Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues; Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven; Eric Walrond, Tropic Death; W. C. Handy, Blues: An Anthology; and Walter White, Flight.

1927

• In Abraham's Bosom by Paul Green, with an all-black cast, won the Pulitzer Prize, May.
• Ethel Waters first appeared on Broadway, July.
• Marcus Garvey deported.
• Louis Armstrong in Chicago and Duke Ellington in New York began their careers.
• Harlem Globetrotters established.
• Charlotte Mason decides to become a patron of the New Negro.
• A'Lelia Walker opens a tearoom salon called "The Dark Tower."
• Publications of Miguel Covarrubias, Negro Drawings; Cullen, Ballad of the Brown Girl, Copper Sun, and Caroling Dusk; Arthur Fauset, For Freedom: A Biographical Story of the American Negro; Hughes, Fine Clothes to the Jew; James Weldon Johnson, God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (reprint of the 1912 edition); Alain Locke and Montgomery T. Gregory, eds. Plays of Negro Life.

1928

• Countee Cullen marries Nina Yolande, daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, April 9; described as the social event of the decade.
• Publications of Wallace Thurman, Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; Du Bois, The Dark Princess; Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho; Nella Larsen, Quicksand; Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem.

1929

• Negro Experimental Theatre founded, February; Negro art Theatre founded, June; National Colored Players founded, September.
• Wallace Thurman's play Harlem, written with William Jourdan Rapp, opens at the Apollo Theater on Broadway and becomes hugely successful.
• Black Thursday, October 29, Stock Exchange crash.
• Publications of Cullen, The Black Christ and Other Poems;Claude McKay, Banjo; Nella Larsen, Passing; Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry; and Walter White, Rope and Faggot: The Biography of Judge Lynch.

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1930

• The Green Pastures (musical), with an all-black cast, opened on Broadway, February 26.
• Universal Holy Temple of Tranquillity founded; Black Muslims opened Islam Temple in Detroit.
• Publications of Randolph Edmonds, Shades and Shadows; Charles S. Johnson, The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations; James Weldon Johnson. Black Manhattan; Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter.

1931

• Scottsboro trial, April through July.
• A'Lelia Walker dies, August 16.
• Publications of Arna Bontemps, God Sends Sunday; Jessie Fauset, The Chinaberry Tree; Langston Hughes, Dear Lovely Death, The Negro Mother, Not Without Laughter, Scottsboro Limited; Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900; George S. Schuyler, Black No More; and Toomer, Essentials.

1932

• Twenty young black intellectuals travel to Russia to make a movie, Black and White, June.
• Mass defection of blacks from the Republican party began.
• Publications of Sterling Brown, Southern Road; Cullen, One Way to Heaven; Rudolph Fisher, The Conjure Man Dies; Hughes, The Dream Keeper; Claude McKay, Ginger Town; Schuyler, Slaves Today; Thurman, Infants of the Spring.

1933

• National Negro Business League ceased operations after 33 years.
• Publications of Jessie Fauset, Comedy, American Style; James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way; McKay, Banana Bottom.

1934

• Rudolph Fisher and Wallace Thurman die within four days of each other, December 22 and 26.
• W.E.B. Du Bois resigns from The Crisis and NAACP.
• Apollo Theatre opened.
• Publications of Arna Bontemps, You Can't Pet a Possum; Randolph Edmonds, Six Plays for the Negro Theatre; Hughes, The Ways of White Folks; Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine; James Weldon Johnson, Negro Americans: What Now?; George Lee, Beale Street: Where the Blues Began.

1935

• Harlem Race Riot, March 19.
• Porgy and Bess, with an all-black cast, opens on Broadway, October 10.
• Mulatto by Langston Hughes, first full-length play by a black writer, opens on Broadway, October 25.
• 50 percent of Harlem's families unemployed.
• Publications of Cullen, The Medea and Other Poems; Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men; Willis Richardson and May Sullivan, Negro History in Thirteen Plays.

1937 Publications of McKay, Long Way From Home; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

1939 Publication of Hurston, Moses: Man of the Mountain.

1940 Publications of Hughes The Big Sea; McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis.

(Information for the above chronology is from Kellner, Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary for the Era and Watson, The Harlem Renaissance.)

| Top | Harlem Renaissance: An Assessment from Huggins, Nathan I. Harlem Renaissance. NY: Oxford UP, 1971.

1. Harlem Renaissance brought the Black experience clearly within the general American cultural history.

a. Remarkable coincidences and luck, provided a sizable chunk of real estate in the heart of Manhattan.

b. The Black migration, from south to north, changed their image from rural to urban, from peasant to sophisticate.

c. Harlem became a crossroads where Blacks interacted with and expanded their contacts internationally.

d. Harlem Renaissance profited from a spirit of self-determination which was widespread after W.W.I.

2. Harlem Renaissance could not escape its history and culture in its attempt to create a new one.

a. The "renaissance" echoed American progressivism in its faith in democratic reform, in its belief in art and literature as agents of change, and in its almost uncritical belief in itself and its future.

b. The creation of the "New Negro" failed, but it was an American failure, similar to other frustrated promotions.

c. The future of the "New Negro" was accepted without question.

d. Just as the Whites, Black intellectuals were unprepared for the rude shock of the Great Depression; the HR was shattered by it because of naive assumptions about the centrality of culture, unrelated to economic and social realities.

3. Still the Harlem Renaissance had its significance.

a. It became a symbol and a point of reference for everyone to recall.

b. The name, more than the place, became synonymous with new vitality, Black urbanity, and Black militancy.

c. It became a racial focal point for Blacks the world over; it remained for a time a race capital.

d. It stood for urban pluralism; Alain Locke wrote: "The peasant, the student, the businessman, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast, each group has come with its own special motives ... but their greatest experience has been the finding of one another."

e. The complexity of the urban setting was important for Blacks to truly appreciate the variety of Black life. The race consciousness required that shared experience.

4. Harlem Renaissance's legacy is limited by the character of the Renaissance.

a. It encouraged the new appreciation of folk roots and culture.

b. Peasant folk materials and spirituals provided a rich source for racial imagination and it freed the Blacks from the establishment of past condition.

c. Harlem Renaissance was imprisoned by its innocence. The Harlem intellectuals, while proclaiming a new race consciousness, became mimics of Whites, wearing clothes and using manners of sophisticated Whites, earning the epithet "dicty niggers" from the very people they were supposed to be championing.

d. Harlem Renaissance could not overcome the overwhelming White presence in commerce which defined art and culture. What was needed was a rejection of White values; they had to see Whites, without awe of love or awe of hate, and themselves truly, without myth or fantasy, in order that they could be themselves in life and art.

e. Harlem Renaissance created an ethnic provincialism and its biggest gift could be a lesson from its failures. The biggest is in the strange separation of the Blacks from American culture. Except for a few Blacks, the most striking thing about them is that they are native American. The negative implications have been clear; Blacks, unlike other immigrants, had no immediate past and history and culture to celebrate. But the positive implications of American nativity have never been fully appreciated by them. It seems too simple: the Afro-American's history and culture is American, more completely so than most others in the country.

f. At least the decade of the 1920s seems to have been too early for Blacks to have felt the certainty about native culture that would have freed them from crippling self-doubt. ... that is why the art of the Renaissance was so problematic, feckless, not fresh, not real. The lesson it leaves us is that the true Black Renaissance awaits Afro-Americans' claiming their patria, their nativity.