Dunbar and DuBois

We all "wear the mask"; don't get me wrong, I think Dunbar's poem speaks about the plight and "twoness" of the African American community in the US, especially during the turn of the century and after the lost opportunities of the Reconstruction era.  Booker T. certainly wore the mask when he sat down to dinner with TR (the first African American to be invited to the white house) and Dr. WEB, though he proudly rejected the need to conform to the white power elite, was tinted by the paint of oppression as well. 
     However, I think the poem resonates with all of humanity from the most oppressed among us to someone who is just feeling depressed, sad or low on any given day.
      The Hispanic and Native Americans wear the mask (see B. Kingsolver's "The Bean Trees" for a great ending plot twist involving race!),  the Asian Americans wear the mask, the Maya be it Quiche or lowland(yes, there are still Mayans and they are greatly oppressed) wear the mask in Mexico and Central America, the speakers of Quechua and Aymara wear the mask in South America, the Aborigines wear the mask in Australia (see B. Chatwins "The Songlines"), the Hazara wear the mask in Afghanistan (see K. Hosseini's "Kite Runner"), the Dalit or "untouchables" wear the mask in India (see A. Roy's "The God of Small Things"),  the Turks wear the mask in Germany and, yes, women the world over wear the mask -- literally! It can be a burka or mascara.  Ask yourself does a woman in a job interview wear make-up to make herself feel better or because she's more likely to land the job?  Maybe both but, societal pressure is there. 
      The best advice I can give about why certain people of the world have to "wear the mask" comes from a scientific book that was seminal in understanding human history for me.  Jared Diamond's  "Guns, Germs and Steel "  This book (possibly my all time favorite) explains why global societies developed the way they did -- where the largest pockets of domesticable animals and plants were and why.  How societies could use these advantages to gain comfort and power; with a scientific lens we can, then, understand how natural and true racial equality really is before luck, power, politics and dogma come into play.  A solidly factual refutation of Charles Murray's controversial book "The Bell Curve" which is quite interesting and scholarly but gets the question of race and IQ incredibly wrong in two of its chapters. 
       The next book (one of my all time favorites) that speaks directly to this notion of "twoness" and  the "mask" is Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird".  I love this book and have to admit I did not read it(or much fiction) until I was almost 35, about five years ago.  But ingrained in my brain since then, has been chapter 12 and, specifically, the character of Calipurnia, the African American housekeeper.  I have often thought a whole spin-off novel could be written about her and the wisdom she imparts on young Scout and brother Jem.  Jem speaking at the end of  chapter 12 after having gone to a black church with Cal for the first time:   That Calpurnia led a modest double life never dawned on me. The idea that she had a separate existence outside our household was a novel one, to say nothing of her having command of two languages. (12.138)  
In Sociological circles this idea of the "mask" is also called 'fronting'. Some of my favorite people to listen to and learn from on the issue of race are Henry Louis Gates, Maya Angelou, Cornel West, John McWhorter, Michael Eric Dyson, Toni Morrison and Annette Gordon Reed. I also love this quote from a Jay Z lyric about his awareness of the wider world while growing up in the insulated federal housing projects that I think may also apply loosely to this topic: "There are more important things in the world I know, but first I have to deal with the world I know."
Sorry this is so long, I know some -who am I kidding - most of you "May Not Get There With Me!"(what a speech! in Memphis the day before his death) ; I could have made installments like Nate but I had to get it out -- really just getting started too! Peace.

   

Wharton and Gilman

Wharton's "The Other Two" is a very thought-provoking short story about intimacy and the marital bond itself.  I found it well written, packed with great detail and good dialogue; very efficient and multi-layered.
The part I found most interesting was the way Mr. Waythorn went from being the jealous, insecure husband to feeling obliged to and comforted by his wifes' ex-husbands(Haskett 1st, Varick 2nd). He, it seems to me, began to accept the unmovable past, show maturity and, actually, value his wife's life experience despite comparing her to a "bowling shoe"!?(mine, not Wharton's).

Gilman, part of the able Beecher line (Lyman, Harriet, Catherine) who had deep roots in the Cincinnati and SW Ohio area, wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" which can be best desribed simply, as "haunting". As someone who has done a fair bit of home remodeling can atest, I have found the process of  removing ugly wallpaper(whether the pattern looks like "torture" or not) to be among the most tedious.  The narrator in this story is dealing with a depression or psychosis that is spiraling to darker bowels of her brain as the story progresses.  After reading the intro to Gilman, it seems that this story is probably very autobiographical and, one can only hope, somewhat therapeutic as well.  The husband, John, a medical doctor, is patriarchal and overbearing to a flaw despite his seemingly genuine concern for his sick wife. Medicine in the 1890's was still very crude(antibiotics or "germ therapy" was just starting to be tested); not to mention the fact that Postpartum depression is still not very well understood and to some extent still talked about almost as a taboo subject.  This, in  my opinion, just adds to the horror of this story; knowing that Dr. John was exacerbating his wife's illness with his dictatorial prescriptions. In the end,  she was stricken and confined not only by her clinical depression but also by "The Man-Made World" in which she lived.             

Bierce short story

I found "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" quite compelling and suspenseful.  The style and mechanics of  the story were very well done by Bierce, himself, a former soldier in the Union Army during the Civil War.  Creatively written, the author managed to weave history, espionage and psychological intrigue into this brief story.  At the end, when the reader becomes aware and the final twist is revealed the first thoughts to my mind were that of "hope" and "denial" about the planter's mindset about his impending fate. 
Something not specifically defined but rather left fairly vague were Mr. Farquhar's "circumstances of an imperious nature" which prevented him from fighting, at the spry age of 35, in the Confederate Army. It is possible to speculate, with a historical lens, that Mr. Farquhar had bought a "substitute" to fight in the Civil War in his place considering the fact that he was a "well-to-do planter"; this was a common practice among the upper class in the South and the inequities of the Confederate draft are well documented.  Maybe this contributed to a feeling of guilt within Mr. Farquhar and, therefore, made him even more apt to be tricked into the plot to burn the bridge?  Great story; I think it was a Hitchcock series episode on TV in 1959.


    

jewett and twain shorts

I liked the "The White Heron" better than the Twain piece even though there were some clever uses of colloqial speech and humorous dialogue in the latter.  I really enjoyed the Jewett short -- reminded me a bit of a great children's author, Robert McClosky(also from the northeast), in its setting and theme.  I was really pulling for "Sylvy" to make the choice that she did in the end; ten dollars was probably a great deal of money in 1886 for an eight year old or any commoner for that matter.  The grandmother, "Mrs. Tilley" was written with a beautiful regional dialect and the natural setting was well described-- I'd like to go find that tree myself now! I do wonder if "Sylvy" would have made the same choice had she been 15ish and equally attracted to the young hunter; I think the pressure to divulge the graceful bird's dwelling would have been even greater than it already was. 
Secondarily, this short made me think about how societal trends/conformity affect our natural environment; Egrets and many other birds as well as beavers and bison were hunted nearly to extinction for aesthetic fashion or ornament during these times; now and for the last decade or so, the lack of originality of the well-healed at high end restaurants has done the same thing to the Chilean sea bass. Smelt anyone! 

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