Susan Glaspell - Trifles

                The play ‘Trifles’ by Susan Glaspell is a murder mystery that explores gender relationships, power between sexes, and the nature of truth.  This is the kind of reading material that interests me and I loved reading this play.  I love mystery murder novels and TV shows as well.  This is based on actual events that occurred in Iowa at the turn of the century.  Glaspell covered the murder trial of a farmer’s wife, Margaret Hossack, in Indianola, Iowa while she worked as a reporter for the Des Moines News.  Hossack was accused of murdering her husband.  The play ‘Trifles’ is based on a story very similar to this but Glaspell used different names.  Within the play, the farmer and his wife never actually appear.  The story focuses on the prosecutor, George Henderson, who has been called in to investigate the murder; Henry Peters, the local sheriff; Lewis Hale, a neighboring farmer who discovered Wright’s body; and Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, wives of the two local men.  The three men rage and storm around the farmhouse and the barn searching for clues.  The two women discover bits of evidence in the ‘trifles’ of a farmer’s wife – her baking, cleaning and sewing.  The three men virtually ignore the woman’s world; they remain blind to the truth before their eyes.  I think that the most important theme in ‘Trifles’ is the diversity between men and women.  The two sexes are separated by the roles that they play in society, their physicality, their methods of communication and their powers of observation.  Through this play men tend to be hostile, forceful, impolite, critical and selfish.  Women are more cautious, purposeful, sensitive, and thoughtful to the needs of others.  This is why the women were able to find more clues than the men were.  The women thought and looked for things the way that a woman would.  Relating to someone can help you to better understand what they are going through and why they do the things that they do.  There is never any proof of who tied the rope around Wright’s neck so more than likely Mrs. Wright will not be charged for his murder.  I think that if the men would have found the dead bird in the red box then they would have had proof that there were problems within the home and possibly a motive for the murder.        

Susan Glaspell - Biography

                Susan Glaspell was born in Davenport, Iowa on July 1, 1876.  She graduated from Drake University.  She worked for the Des Moines Daily News as a journalist.  Once her stories began appearing in magazines such as Harper’s and The Ladies’ Home Journal, she gave up the newspaper business.  Glaspell met George Cook, a brilliant stage director, in 1915.  The two of them initiated the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  The Players were an outstanding gathering of actors, directors, and writers.  Much of her writing is strongly feminist.  Most of her writings deal with the roles that women play or are force to play in society and the relationships between men and women.  She has written more than ten plays for the Provincetown Players.  Glaspell married George Cook in 1922.  They moved to New York City and she continued to write, mostly fiction stories and plays.  In 1931, she won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘Alison’s House’ which is a play based loosely on the life and family of Emily Dickinson.  The latter part of her life was spent on Cape Cod writing.  Susan Glaspell is a very interesting late 19^th century woman writer.  She was raised in the local color tradition which totally changed her life and art, after her marriage and moved east.  About the same time American writing moved from regionalism to modernism, Glaspell “came of age.”  She helped found the modern movement in American drama.  She returned to fiction and earlier themes when her experimental period was over.  Her fiction and earlier themes were much more maturely presented.  No one can say for sure if her retreat back to regionalism was because of her husband’s death or because she felt more secure in the older tradition.  In the summer of 1948, Glaspell died in Provincetown.  She left behind a literacy legacy that includes 13 plays, 14 novels, and 50 short stories, article, and essays.  Her drama will ensure her a lasting place in Modern American literature.  Glaspell wrote honestly of women’s struggle to persecution at a time when radical female voices were hardly ever heard and even more hardly ever listen to.                       

          

Works Cited

"Susan Glaspell : Biography." Spartacus Educational - Home Page. Web. 02 Mar. 2011. <http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jglaspell.htm>.

McMichael, George, and James S. Leonard. "Susan Glaspell." Anthology of American Literature. 10th ed. Vol. II. Glenview: Pearson Education, 2011. 1316-318. Print.

Willa Cather - Paul’s Case

    

     I enjoyed reading the short story ‘Paul’s Case’ by Willa Cather.  I would consider Paul as a troubled child who was having a hard life. I found that the red carnations were a symbol throughout this short story.  The red carnations that Paul often wears in his buttonholes represent him.  At the opening of the story, when Paul wears a red carnation to meet his teachers and the principal, the adults correctly interpret the red carnations as evidence of Paul’s continued disobedience.  The teacher and principal would like for Paul to show some remorse, but the brisk flower proves that he feels none.  At the conclusion of the story, Paul buys red carnations.  As he is walking towards the train tracks, he observes that the carnations have wilted in the cold.  Paul then buries one of the flowers in the snow before he leaps in front of the train.  The burial of the carnations is a symbolic prelude to Paul’s actual suicide. 

     Paul never truly fits in anywhere nor does he ever feel comfortable in his own body.  He is moving through his world uncomfortably.  Paul is obsessed with art, theater, and music.  His job at Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh allows him to indulge in his obsessions.  Paul has an impractical idea that the art world is an ideal fantasyland.  He uses art as a drug to escape his miserable existence.  Paul never has a desire to join the art world that he so admires, instead, he only wants to sit back and observe other people.  Paul feels disrespect for his teachers, classmates, neighbors, and family members, all of whom he sees as completely narrow-minded. 

     Paul is also obsessed with money.  He wants to be rich and he believes that great wealth is in his future.   Paul lies constantly in order to get out of a sticky situation and sometimes just to impress his classmates and teachers because of his selfishness and desperation to escape his own understated life.  Cather makes it very clear that Paul has homosexual tendencies even though it is never clear if he acknowledges or acts upon them.  Paul feels isolated from society because of his homosexuality and his general despise for other people. 

     Paul’s self-destructive desires strengthen throughout the story.  He first wishes to escape life by submerging himself in art.  Cather’s language suggests his longing for silence, when he is standing outside of the soprano’s house and listening to the symphony.  Paul wants to let art take him away, “blue league after blue league, away from everything.”  He spend one entire night imagining what would happen if his father mistakenly thought that he was a burglar and shot him.  Paul also imagines what would happen if his father did not regret killing him.  The inference from all these images is that Paul believes that one day he will fail and disgust his father so significantly that his father will wish him dead.  Near the end of the story, we learn that Paul bought a gun when he arrived in New York because even at the beginning of his adventure, he anticipated that he might need “a way to snap the thread.”  The narrator mentions darkness in Paul several times throughout the story.  This darkness that is mentioned is a fear that he has felt since he was a child.  In the end, Paul ultimately commits suicide but not because of only one event or one character trait.  All of his causes for misery, isolation, and alienation are what leads him to leap in front of a train.                                           

Works Cited

SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2007. Web. 2 March. 2011

Willa Cather - A Wagner Matinee

     I enjoyed reading the short story ‘A Wagner Matinee’ by Willa Cather.  The details in this story is great, I can visualize most of everything that is described.  A theme of love is established throughout this short story.  Aunt Georgiana shows love towards music, her hometown of Boston, and her husband.  Clark shows his love for his aunt and his respect for her sacrifice when he comforts her and recalls the lessons about music, literature, and culture that she gave him as a child.  This short story is about a man, Clark, who received a letter stating that his aunt is coming to town.  Clark has been asked to take care of his aunt while she is in town.  Clark remembers his aunt lovingly and he wants to show her a good time while she is in town.  He decides to take her to an opera because she was trained in music when she was younger.  The story takes place on Boston, but Clark portrays Nebraska in great detail.  He described how the early settlers lived in dugout homes, which he says made their “inmates” return to “primitive savagery.”  He talks of the flatness of the landscape and the endless rows of corn.  Clark describes his Aunt Georgiana’s house as being weather worn, “black and grim as a wooden fortress,” and located near a “black pond.”  He describes the weather as constantly exposing its residents “to a pitiless wind, and to the alkaline water, which transforms the most transparent cuticle into sort of flexible leather."  Clark is telling the story and he describes himself as having been “a gangling farmer-boy" with "chilblains and bashfulness."  Clark is a bachelor who lives in Boston.  He is a very well civilized man and he takes his aunt to the opera to show her how much he appreciates her.  He wants to give back to his aunt for all the efforts that she put into raising him as a child.  His aunt Georgiana gave him an appreciation for music and he knows a lot about Wagner.  Clark hates Nebraska and he characterizes his aunt’s life there negatively.  His aunt was a well-trained music teacher at the Boston Conservatory.  When she was younger she traveled to Paris.  At the age of 30, she met her husband, Howard, and she eloped with him to a Nebraska homestead.  She is coming to Boston to settle an estate that was left to her.  Her appearance is “shocking” to Clark.  She is small, distorted, and has yellow, leathery skin.  Clark states that she wears false teeth and her eyebrows and mouth twitch.  Georgiana has lived in Nebraska for 30 years and she has not left Nebraska for the entire time that she has lived there.  Her nephew calls her pathetic and ridiculous.  His aunt helped him learn Latin, the organ, Shakespeare, and classical music when he was younger.  When she left Boston for Nebraska she sacrificed her music.       

Works Cited

  "A Wagner Matinee." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 2004. 2 March 2011. <http://www.enotes.com/topic/A_Wagner_Matinee>.

"A Wagner Matinee by Cather." Notes4free. Web. 02 Mar. 2011. <http://www.notes4free.com/a-wagner-matinee-by-cather>.

Biography of Willa Cather

     Willa Cather was born on December 7, 1873 in Back Creek Valley which is a small farming community close to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.  Her father, Charles Cather, was a deputy sheriff and her mother was Mary Virginia Boak Cather.  Willa was the oldest child in her family.  The Cather family moved to Webster County, Nebraska to join Willa’s grandparents William and Caroline and her uncle George in 1883.  At this time the family consisted of Willa’s two brothers Roscoe and Douglass, a sister named Jessica and her grandmother Rachel Boak who all lived with them.  They moved to Red Cloud, a nearby railroad town, a year later where her father opened a loan and insurance office.  The Cather family never became wealthy or powerful.  Willa blamed their lack of financial success to her father because he placed intellectual and spiritual matters over the business.  Willa’s mother was a proud woman who was mostly concerned with fashion and turning Willa into “a lady.”  Willa resisted the norms for girls and she cut her hair short and wore trousers.  Many characters that are used in her writings are inspired by people that she me in her youth at some point in time.  In 1890, Willa graduated from Red Cloud High School.  Soon after her graduation she moved to the state capitol in Lincoln in order to study for the entrance at the University of Nebraska.  Willa was actually interested in the study of medicine because while in Red Cloud she had spent time and learned from a local doctor, and she dreamed of becoming a physician.  One of Willa’s stories from a writing class got published and then she discovered her desire for writing.  While in college, Willa spent time editing the school magazine and publishing articles and play reviews in the local papers.  She published her short story ‘Peter’ in a Boston magazine in 1892.  She graduated from college in 1895 and returned to Red Cloud until she was offered a position editing Home Monthly in Pittsburgh.  She wrote short storied to fill it pages while she was editing the magazine.  She worked as a high school English teacher between 1901 and 1906.  During the time that she was a teacher she wrote the stories that would be published in her first collection called the Troll Garden (1905).  These short stories brought her to the attention of S.S. McClure who was the owner of the most widely read magazines of the day.  Cather then moved to New York to join McClure’s Magazine in 1906 originally as a member of the staff and finally as its managing editor.  Sara Orne Jewett inspired Cather to write about Nebraska.  Willa left McClure’s Magazine in 1912 and began writing on her own.  In 1912, she published ‘Alexander’s Bridge’ and she visited the Southwest where she became very interested by the Anasazi cliff dwellings.  ‘O Pioneers’ was published in 1913 and in 1917 she wrote ‘My Antonia’ while she lived in New Hampshire.  She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her story ‘One of Ours’ and in that same year her modernist book ‘A Lost Lady’ was published.  Her novels up to this point focused on the devastation of small-town life and the death of the pioneering tradition.  Willa was possibly overwhelmed by so much success that she suffered a period of despair which was reflected in the darker tones of the novels that were written during this period.  Regardless of her problems, Willa wrote some of her greatest novels during this period.  Many of Cather’s stories are written with deeply-held beliefs and values.  Some values that Cather had was respect for art, history, and splendor and circumstance of organized Catholic and Episcopalian religion.  She thought that people and civilizations who live in agreement with their natural environments are, and should be, sources of inspiration.  Cather criticized greed and the beginning of modern mass culture which she believed reduced human intellectual achievement and spoiled public taste.  Cather was blessed with widespread popular success and astonishing critical success early in her career.  All of her books were viewed with widespread praise and admiration.  In the 1930s this pattern began to change because of the Marxist Criticism.  The Marxist critics states that Cather didn’t understand or show any concern for modern issues.  They made fun of the romanticism which inspired her stories.  These years were very difficult for Cather because of the death of her mother, brothers and her best friend Isabelle McClung.  Even though she had some difficult years she still continued writing actively publishing novels and short stories until her death on April 24, 1947.  She ordered for all her letters to be burned at the time of her death.  Thousands of her letters escaped destruction but her will prevented them for their publication.  Her body was buried in New Hampshire.  In Red Cloud, the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Foundation was created to honor her memory.                                                                                  

Works Cited

"Biography of Willa Cather | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver." Study Guides & Essay Editing | GradeSaver. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.gradesaver.com/author/willa-cather/.

Norris, Kathleen. "Willa Cather - About Willa Cather | American Masters | PBS." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. 7 Sept. 2005. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/willa-cather/about-willa-cather/549/.

Zora Hurston - John Redding Goes to Sea

I enjoyed reading the story ‘John Redding Goes to Sea’ but the language was difficult to understand because it was written in slang.  This short story was Hurston’s first ever published.  The short story was published in May 1921 in the issue of the Stylus, the literary magazine of Howard University.  It was then reprinted in the issue of Opportunity in January 1926.  This story is clearly the work of a new writer because of its highly unnatural plot, excessive sentimentality, and shallow characterizations.  In the story John Redding is a young, male character, who wants to leave his hometown to understand and explore parts and things unknown.  There a several events that happen to keep him from fulfilling his dream.  The first event is with his mother.  She is pitifully controlling, obsessive, and irrational.  She declares illness and threatens to deny John if he leaves.  Matty Redding is determined not to let John engage in his dreams.  The second event is John’s marriage to Stella Kanty which seems to bind him permanently to his surroundings.  His new wife, Stella, joins forces with his mother to discourage his desire to travel.  John’s mother’s rages keep him from even joining the Navy when that opportunity comes his way.  John is then killed in a rainstorm while he is working with a crew to build a bridge on the St. John’s River.  His father prohibits his body to be retrieved from the river as it floats toward the ocean.  Finally, John will get his wish to travel and see the world, although in death.  The plot seems to be overdone and sentimentally overwhelming but it provides the reader the first of many glimpses of life among black Floridians and their habits, superstitions, strengths, and shortcomings.  Matty believes that her son was cursed with “travel dust” at his birth.  John’s longing to travel is Matty’s punishment for having married his father away from a competing man.  Hurston delays judgment on Matty’s beliefs because she knows that these and other beliefs are important parts of the life of these folk. A strength that is easily visible in Hurston’s first short story is her detailed description of the setting.  Hurston has a sharp eye for detail.  This is obvious in her descriptions of the magnificence of Florida.  The most important aspect of ‘John Redding Goes to Sea’ is the theme that people must be free to develop and follow their own dreams.  John Redding is deprived of self-expression and self-determination because of the wishes and interpretations of others that were forced upon him.  Hurston has no sympathy for those who would deprive another person of freedom and independence.  She disputed all such restrictive efforts throughout her career as a writer and a folklorist.    

Works Cited

Carson, Warren J., and Deborah Kaplan. "Salem Press." Salem Press - Welcome. SALEM PRESS, INC., Apr. 2006. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://salempress.com/store/samples/notable_african/notable_african_hurston.htm. 

  

Biography of Zora Neale Hurston

     Zora Neale Hurston’s is considered one of the well-known writers of the twentieth-century African-American literature.  She was born on January 7, 1891 in the small town of Notasulga, Alabama.  Her father was as carpenter, a sharecropper, and a Baptist preacher.  Her mother, Lucy, was a former schoolteacher.  Zora was the fifth of eight children in the household of the Hurston’s.  Within a year of her birth, the family moved to Eatonville, Florida.  Eatonville was the first integrated black town in the United States.  Zora’s mother died in 1904 and Zora was devastated by her death.  Her father removed her from school later that same year and sent her to care for her brother’s children.  She was a rowdy and impatient teenager and was ready to leave the assignment of her brother’s household.  At the age of sixteen she became a member of a traveling theater and she later began domestic work in a white household.  The woman that she worked for bought her, her first book and arranged for Zora to attend high school at Morgan Academy in Baltimore.  Zora graduated in June 1918.  The following summer, Zora worked as a waitress and a manicurist before she enrolled in Howard Prep School.  Later she attended Howard University.  She spent almost four years at Howard but she only graduated with a two-tear Associate degree.  The early 1920s mark the beginning of Zora Neale Hurston’s career as an author because she spent most of her time at Howard writing.  She started with a college publication and then she entered into writing contests in newspapers and magazines.  The Harlem Renaissance was building steam in 1925 and Hurston headed to New York City.  In New York, she enrolled in Barnard College to study anthropology under Franz Boas, an important founder of the discipline of anthropology.  While in New York, Hurston married her boyfriend Herbert Sheen from Howard University but their marriage was brief.  Once Zora graduated from Barnard, she returned to her hometown of Eatonville to gather materials for her maturing writing career.  She published numerous works in the 1920s and thus gained financial sponsorship from wealthy New York sponsors.  Hurston’s literary career peaked in the 1930s and early 1940s.  Zora completed graduate work at Columbia, published four novels, and an autobiography.  One of her novels is ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ and she will be reading this novel later in this class.  She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.  She journeyed to the Caribbean where she became interested by the practice of voodoo.  After her visit to the Caribbean, she began to include supernatural elements into her novels and stories.  She often felt like she was under attack by members of the Black Arts Movement because her work received increasing approval from the white publishers of New York.  Zora labeled these critics as members of the “niggerati” for being close-minded in their criticism of her racial politics.  Hurston’s writing career was weakening by the mid-1940s and she was arrested and charged with the molestation of a ten-year-old boy.  Even though she was innocent, the damages to her image remained forever.  Zora then lapsed into depression as the publishers declined her works one right after another.  Hurston returned to Florida around 1950 where she worked cleaning houses.  Hurston became a penniless loner after a slew of unsuccessful career changes including those of a newspaper journalist, librarian, and a substitute teacher.  In 1959, she suffered a fatal stroke and was buried at an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida.                                                                             

Works Cited

Zora Neale Hurston. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.zoranealehurston.com/.

Zora Neale Hurston. Web. 01 Mar. 2011.    http://www.zoranealehurston.com/biography.html.

"Biography of Zora Neale Hurston | List of Works, Study Guides & Essays | GradeSaver." Study Guides & Essay Editing | GradeSaver. Web. 01 Mar. 2011. http://www.gradesaver.com/author/zora-neale-hurston/.