Black men in The United States want to have white wives, or at least white looking wives, as Ifemelu said in her blog “Many successful American black men have white wives.”(Adichie 265) Maybe that’s the whole point, to be successful, to get somewhere in life. If they have whit wives or white looking wives, who can at least pass as a white female would be the reason of being more successful and black men would be more valued more in the society. They will be respected by cops, their children could attend good schools and not be harassed because of being black and would be safe. No one would degrade them or their children because they have a solid base to work with. Black women are always kept on the down low because they’re not considered pretty enough to be with in the public. Women look up to Barack Obama because he brought hope to these women to be considered pretty for whom they are. “He broke the mold!” Ifemelu mentioned (Adichie 265) “He married one of their own. He knows what the world does seem to know: that dark black women totally rock.” If black men only want to marry white women, what will happen to their own kind? Who will they get married to? Black men seem to be so focused on being successful, being out there and not being degraded, they become selfish and stop caring about their own society. But rather move on and step along with a different one, so they can escape from their the background they came from. Barack Obama saw differently, he knew he could make a difference by just marrying his own, to marry within the community/ society. To show people women are beautiful no matter what color they are, what shape they have, looks matter but brains matter more. To him education matters more, manners mattered more and that’s why so many black women like Obama. He showed that black men can be successful with black women standing by their side. Media is a source where it shown the importance of white women in America over black women. Black women are never the main character in any shows or movies. They’re always the negative character and are hidden and are always given the lowest roles to be acting in. All of this is an explanation of “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” By Audrie Lorde. “Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm… In America, this norm is usually defined as a white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secured.” (Lorde 116) This is what all these black men are trying to do. They’re trying to follow the norm, for the most part. To have a secure and successful future for themselves and their kids. I actually belong from Pakistan and people always mistake me as a Spanish or a Russian person. It doesn’t always go in a negative way. I am spoken Spanish to and am expected to reply in the same language. But I can’t close my eyes and say, yes I am Spanish or Russian or whatever people think I am just to fit in the norm and the society.

Ifemelu’s sexual experience in Americanah was pleasant, it was actually with love and when Obinze and Ifemelu did it, it was pleasure and not rape or abuse. They were happy to do it as Obinze said “if it doesn’t work, then we will welcome Junior.”(Adichie 114) There was a fear of her being pregnant but not in a bad way. She said is he might find someone better but he was solid on keeping the baby if he got her pregnant.

Esther’s experience was a completely different, she actually prepared herself by getting a “fitting” done before going to the professor Irwin and actually having sex. She wasn’t scared of getting pregnant but after she had sex with the professor she bled a lot and had to go to the hospital to stop the bleeding. And after she was treated she sent the bill to Irwin and never saw him again.

In The Color Purple, Celie’s first sexual experience was very disturbing. Since it was her father figure and he warned her not to tell anyone by saying, “you better not tell no one but God, itll kill your mammy.” After she went through that experience, she was very lonely and isolated from the world. So she started to tell her story to God as she was told by her step- father. The aftermath was a mess too, she was pregnant twice and her children were given away.

Everyone’s sexual experiences are different, Ifemelu’s experience was joyful and Celie went through hell and it never got better for her. Even when she got married, that experience was also terrifying. Esther on the other hand found her liberation in her sexual experience.

Americanah is third person’s point of view because Ngozi Adichie uses the third form (he, she) while describing all the characters. The story is told by the narrator. Americanah is about a black woman Ifemelu who moves from Nigeria to the United States and she is trying to understand the new culture. She has a hard time to find a place to get her hair braided because the area she lives in (Princeton) is a white neighborhood and there aren’t salons for hair braiding. As the story goes on the narrator describes the people Ifemelu comes across, “The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public.” (Ngozi Adichie 4) Ifemelu and the man standing next to her are both described in he and she, which proves that the book is written in third-person narration.

It is objective because the narrator can’t get into any of the characters minds, she only describes what is going on around the surroundings of the characters. When Ifemelu finally reaches to the salon, the ladies working there are speaking in English and French. “Trois! Cinq! Non, non, cinq!” (Ngozi Adichie 13) The narrator doesn’t say the meaning of the numbers and also who is on the other side of the phone. Which shows she has no access to the character Mariama was talking to. Which proves the point of point of view being objective. Ifemelu is going back to her country and she decides to close the blog she writes. “She would sit in cafes, or airports or train stations, watching strangers, watching strangers, imagining their lives, and wondering which of them were likely to have read her blog. Now her ex-blog.” (5) This also shows that the narrator is telling the story and not Ifemelu herself.

In “The color purple,” Alice walker shows how different upbringing have different effects on personalities of everyone’s lives. Celie and Sofia are two perfect examples of how different environments make two different characters. Celie and Sofia both are deprived of love and respect from the men in their families in their upbringing years. Celie had to deal with a step father who abused and raped her, got her out of school and then had her marry a man who liked her sister. She got pregnant twice with her step father’s children, who he gives away after birth. Her husband Mr.______ doesn’t even talk to her much. She doesn’t even know his first name. He also beats her up as well, just like her father did. She’s there to take care of his three kids and do all the house work. She is very isolated from the world, her mom doesn’t care about her after her rape. She can’t talk to her sister about it and she is warned by her step father not to say anything to anyone but God. So she writes letters to God, to mourn over the pain she deals with, and to get it off her chest even if it’s only in writing letters to basically herself.

Sofia has a difficult childhood as well, she had to fight every man in her family. She is also pregnant before she gets married at the age of fifteen. She isn’t educated but she is strong (physically and mentally). She is able to take a stand for herself. She doesn’t let any man step over her, beat her or tell her what to do. She is married to Harpo (Celine’s son) who loves her at first but since she’s such a strong woman and doesn’t depend on anyone, he doesn’t know how to deal with her. And Celie is a bit jealous of that. Celie suggests to give her a beating, which ends up getting him hurt the first time and pretty beaten up the second time he tries. She doesn’t do a lot of chores like Celie, she does what she likes to do.

Celie is quite and was brought up to not to speak up for herself. All she can do is bear the suffering she gets from everyone around her. She has no control about the situations that were happening in life. But as she grew older and met more people especially Shug Avery and Sofia, she gets her voice. She stands up to Mr____ and gets her own business and life together.

Esther’s journey through out the Bell jar

Outline

The bell jar shows how Esther’s life has changed throughout the year with different experiences. How she had struggled with second wave feminism and how she didn’t fit into her gender role.

Esther’s background
-Brought up in lower class
-From Boston
-Straight A student
-A girl with many dreams
-Wanting to have it all
-A writer/ Jay Cee’s office assistant
-Not wanting a husband and family
-Easily inspired by people and surroundings
-A liar about her personality
-Depressed

Crises she faces
-Doreen/ Hostel mates
-Lenny
-Wanting to be a publisher/Writer
-Buddy Willard
-Castantin
-Jay Cee
-The fig tree, where she doesn’t know rather to pick career or family because if she chooses one, she loses the rest.
-Marco/ assault, rape attempt
-Doctor Gordon
-Her mother
-Attempted suicide
-Mental hospital/ assylum
-Crazy assylum mates
-Shock treatments
-Fitting
-Sleeping with professor Irwin

What was expected of her?
-To get married
-Be a housewife
-Or choose a career
-Be pure
-Know shorthand
-Be educated
-Be comfortable with being a housewife
-being happy with you husband and your home

Changes with these experiences
-Learned to be happy with herself
-Satisfied after getting out of asylum
-Not having to be married to Buddy
-A positive aspect towards her life
Esther is facing all these struggles of not being able to have what she wants, to spend her life in the way she wants to spend it. Experiences change people, sometimes there are negative effects and sometimes there are positive. With her experiences, she went into a complete depression but fought it and ended up with being happy and positive.

Race is not the main focus of the novel but race isn’t ignored completely. Esther doesn’t disclose her racial status but how she describes everyone else does show that it is based on white/ Caucasian people. Male or female, everyone is described to have white features, as Esther states about Doreen’s “… cotton candy fluff hair round her head and blue eyes like transparent agate marbles…” (Plath, 4). A person of color cannot have what Doreen has. Other than that she describes Hilda as “… six feet tall, with huge, slanted green eyes and thick red lips and a vacant expression.” (Plath, 28). “…Mr. Willard’s face– the silver hair in its boyish crewcut, the clear blue eyes, the pink cheeks,…” (Plath, 87). These are only a few but everyone Easter talks about has these white features and skin color.

Esther explained everyone’s looks in a nice manner until a “Negro” (Plath, 180) came instead of a white male nurse. The way she describes him, it seems like he’s a kid because he’s goofing around with whatever he’s told to do. I believe she looks down at him because he is black and in 1950 it was still rare for an African American to actually work with white society. She kicks him on his leg and hurts him. It could be because she’s in an asylum and is being treated or it could be because he’s annoying her and calling her “Miss Mucky-Muck,” (Plath, 181) she doesn’t make it clear why she doesn’t like him.

In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” there are all these topics that women faced back then. Lords is a forty nine year old black lesbian feminist who’s is talking about how the people do not fit into society roles are suppose to teach the ones that do fit. She talks about the differences of race, “Certainly there are real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those difference between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences…” (Lorde, 115). Maybe that’s what it was, Esther was so used to of seeing white and rich society around her that when she saw someone different, she didn’t take him as a human or as a part of their society. But rather as a slave, because he was working there with the nurse.

Fear is the main reason why we can’t do what we want. It stops us from achieving what we want, good or bad. Fear of getting laughed at, fear of pain, fear of getting hurt, fear of anything and everything. It is the root of discouragement. In the reading “Components of Gender,” Laura Frank’s explains that very well, “the fear is the worst before the fact” (Frank 51). She describes that almost everything we are afraid of, we get over it after we make the attempt and know how it feels. We’re only afraid of something until it happens. And then the “pit in your stomach” (Frank 51) gets smaller and smaller and then gone. Nothing lasts forever and nothing hurts forever, “Now I know that even broken bones don’t hurt forever” (Frank 51). I agree to that because once we feel what scares us, it doesn’t scare us anymore, the fear is just an illusion in our heads. She doesn’t want to play the gender games, meaning she doesn’t want to do what society expects of her but rather do the things that she’s fears. People are afraid to be laughed at and to get hurt, that’s why they act in the gender role. They do what society expects them to do instead of what they actually want to do. For example; a gay person wouldn’t want to be laughed at, that’s why they would not be open about it rather hide it and act normal within the society. Not now days but if we look back a couple of years, there was no freedom for them to be open about it.

Esther goes back and forth in playing the gender role. After she got back from New York, she became suicidal. She tried several different ways to kill herself, cutting herself with a blade in a bath tub, drowning, hanging herself, and finally taking pills, “then, one after the other, I lugged the heavy, dust covered logs across the hole mouth” (Plath 169). She took the pills and ended up in the hospital and then asylum. It’s affected her mother, she was upset and almost cried. A woman is not suppose to give up even if she feels depressed and confused, but Esther did and that shows how she didn’t fit into her gender role. Her trying to commit the suicide made her seem crazy. It affected herself negatively and everyone around her.

Esther introduces Doreen as one of her “troubles” (Plath 4) in the very beginning of the book. Doreen is  the definition of perfect beauty, according to society of course. She “… had bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head and blue eyes like transparent agate marbles…”( Plath 4). She is different from the rest of the girls, she is a distraction for Esther. She wears silk robes and is very outgoing, likes to smoke and seems to be very experienced with men and life generally; enough to make sarcastic comments about almost everyone she’d meet. There is no description of what her career is or what she is working on but she definitely seems to be interested in fashion mostly. When they had the shoot for the magazine, her object for describing her career was a sari, ” to show she wanted to be a social worker in India (she didn’t really, she told me she only wanted to get her hands on a Sari).” (Plath 101).

A woman like Doreen would still be considered promiscuous, even in now days because we still live in an era where society plays a big role.  A woman is still expected to be modest and pure and Doreen is the complete opposite. She is an interesting character though, she doesn’t care about the magazine or handing in the drafts like Esther or going to the parties with all the girls but rather go out on her own and get drunk with a random man. She also doesn’t seem lost or confused like Esther, even though she does’t have her mind set on becoming a writer or a poet; she still seems confident and that makes her an interesting character in this book.

Hello everyone,

My name is Nabeela Ahmad, I also go by Nabii. I was born and raised in Brooklyn. My family is originated from Pakistan and migrated to the United States in 1985. I was raised with five men in my house (my uncles) and I was the first girl after a very long time. So growing up I always dressed and acted like a boy. Slowly that changed because of the environment and because my sister was born. I am a full time employee as an analyst at a Bankruptcy firm and a part time student. I stopped attending college because I was never a school person but as I grew older, I realized the importance of education and that made me start college again. My preferred pronouns are “she/her.” I had two electives left to fulfill in order to accomplish my associate degree in liberal arts and sciences. I am always interested in English/literature, therefore; I choose Women studies as one of the electives. So far I am liking the class but the presentation part scares me a bit. I haven’t gotten to know anyone yet but everyone seems nice in their own way. I look forward to getting to know you all.
Besides work and college, I have a hobby of doing henna tattoos and try different makeup looks on myself and my friends. For those of you who don’t know what henna is, it’s a green paste that we put on leave to dry and washes off to an orange to red-ish color. I also love baking, I started baking when I was 17 and still enjoy it.

That’s all for now.

Thank you,

Nabeela.