“Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia.”
[luh–rin-jeez] (Show IPA), larynxes.
“Rosa believed that something had gone wrong with her vocal cords, with her windpipe, with the cave of her larynx: Magda was defective, without a voice; perhaps she was deaf; there might be something amiss with her intelligence; Magda was dumb.
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick (Paragraph 8)
“Rosa saw that today Magda, deserted, was going to die, and at the same time a fearful joy ran in Rosa’s two palms, her fingers were on fire, she was astonished, febrile: Magda, in the sunlight, swaying on her pencil legs, was howling.
“There was not enough milk; sometimes Magda sucked air; then she screamed. Stella was ravenous. Her knees where tumors on sticks, her elbow chicken bones.”
“As the uncle slapped the reins and the horse lurched forward, the boy tried to jump into the wagon, but his mother pried his hands off the boards, crying, Gego, gego, and he fell down hard.”
“She became a gray sky, stared monotonously at the walls, sometimes wept into her hands for hours at a time.”
“She was moody and sullen one moment, her lower lip jutting and her eyes flashing, filled with storms. The next, she would shake her hair over her face and blow it straight out in front of her to make her children scream with laughter.”
I felt like if Halle and Sether didn’t get married, the whole book would have went in a totally different direction. I felt that the whole book revolved around Sethe being married to Halle. I thought this was a important scene because if Sethe and Halle didn’t get married they wouldn’t have kids. Sethe having kids led to a series of events later on in the book. For example, it led to having her milk stolen. This event led to Halle going crazy because he was there to witness it and he couldn’t do anything. If they weren’t married, there wouldn’t be any milk to be stolen, and that she wouldn’t have been scarred from what happen, and even whipped from the school teacher.
Another example if Sethe never got married with Halle, they wouldn’t have children. I felt like her children has a important role in the book because most of the things accruing in the book, it revolves around them. For example in the beginning of the book there was a gravestone of Sethe’s dead daughter, and engraved on it was, Beloved. Then later in the book Sethe, Denver, and Paul D encountered a women whose name was also Beloved. Coincidence? I don’t think so. If Beloved wasn’t born, she wouldn’t have forced out Baby Suggs and her two sons to leave the house because she was haunting the house. Another example if Sethe never married Halle, they wouldn’t have had Denver. Without Denver, Sethe would have never had met Amy Denver.
In the book on page 175, second to last paragraph, it said “Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger women holding a blood- soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels on the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere– in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at– the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arc of its mother’s swing”. If Sethe never got married and had kids, this event would have never happened because she never wanted them to grow up experiencing the world from what is now.
In “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, it talked about how a husband and wife moved to a new place to live because of the wife’s health. In the house she spots a wallpaper, and every night she would feel uneasy because how it looked and felt something was wrong with it. I feel that the wallpaper symbolizes herself. For example she said “a night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!”(p65) and “By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.”(p65), because at night she would freak out and complain to her husband that the wallpaper is bother her and something is weird about it. In the morning she would be calm and quiet that nothing was going on. Another example would be when she said she saw a women behind it. I feel like the women is her because she said that at night the wallpaper would become bars and in the story she is trapped in the room and can’t go anywhere because of her health. So when she ripped the wallpaper down on the day when she was going to leave, showed that she was finally set free from being confined in that room.
In “The Cottagette” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, started off by Malda who was getting love advice from her friend Lois since she was married before, but now divorced. Lois said “but what they want to marry is a homemaker”, telling her that Mr. Matthews would love her if she does the chores around the house. So then she started cooking for him, but from all the cooking and cleaning she never got time to do what she really wanted to do which was draw. So one day he took her out to a picnic and told her to stop cooking and go back to doing what she loved, that he would still love her even though she stopped with the chores.
One thing I wanted to point out in the story when it said “Then Lois unfolded her plan. She had been married, –unhappily married, in her youth; that was all over and done with years ago; she had told me about it long since; and she said she did not regret the pain and loss because it had given her experience, She had her maiden name again-and freedom. She was so fond of me she wanted to give me the benefit of her experience–without the pain.”(p50), reminded me of “A Story Of An Hour” because they were both similar in a way. Mrs. Mallard figured out what freedom was when she found out her husband died and that she was single again. Lois on the other hand found freedom by getting a divorce because the marriage was unsuccessful. Both women faced pain and and loss, but they found freedom and also got their maiden names back.
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