Final Blog Post: What is Women's Literature?

            Women's literature is an important means of expression that has helped women all over the world for many years. Through out the course of this semester every novel and story we have read has to do with a struggle or accomplishment made by women or families in which the writing itself was a means of expression. For example, in "The Vagina Monologues" by Eve Ensler, many women's stories are expressed in order to allow those women to get their inner feelings out in the open and help them to move on or move past difficult moments in their lives.

            Women's literature tells a story of life. It explains and depicts the different struggles and successes that women all over the world share. The fiction novel, "Push" by Sapphire was a great example of this idea. Sapphire took the stories of many young women that she has met and combined them all into one character as a means to tell a story that is relatable and understandable to women everywhere. It was a story of pain and torture that ends with a woman on her way to success, or at the very least making progress. Novels such as these are written to provide hope and understanding for people everywhere. The readers of these novels gain a sense of comfort in knowing things can change or become better as long as a little effort is put into it.

            In "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick, the main character Rosa is one who provides a sense of hopelessness or selflessness who has devoted her entire life to the honoring and remembrance of her dead daughter, Magda. Although through most of the book Rosa is a character without a main grip on reality, she still is a character many people who have lost a loved one can connect with. Rosa, even before her daughters death, showed her sense of selflessness in this passage. "Rosa did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road." Her grip on reality suffered greatly through out her life and through the reading of this novel a woman can get a sense of the struggle of another.  This story telling helps heal, and helps cope. By  reading novels such as this, and Push, a woman can understand how easily life can change and their stories can influence and change the path of it's readers.

            There are many moments in a woman's life that are celebrated or honored in some way. Through the reading of these novels a pattern of definition emerges. The birth or death of a loved one, especially in Rosa's case, both the birth and death of her daughter all at once defined the rest of her life. It was something she could never forget about or never honor enough. She spent the rest of her life chasing after her daughter who had long since passed. Getting an education, such as in Precious' case in "Push", or Dorothy Allison in "Two or Three Things I Know for Sure", is an event in a woman's life that is meant to be celebrated and talked about in order to influence other women to get their education. In both "I Am An Emotional Creature" and "The Vagina Monologues" by Eve Ensler both celebration of personal achievements and venting in anger is present in the pieces about other women's lives. These stories allowed women to talk about situations they may have never gotten a chance to talk about and shows it's readers that by talking, healing can occur.

            This semester was focused around healing. Each and every piece of writing we have read linked back to the idea of storytelling as a means of healing, and reading as a means of healing. All of the stories showed women that it is possible to be okay after a bad situation, or showed it's readers that change can happen. These messages are important in the continuation of women's literature and the success of change in women's lives.

Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison (Post 2)

Dorothy Allison describes her life and the things she has been through not to get pity or respect, even, but instead to help others understand what it took her to change her life. She was born and raised in a place that not too many people got away from. It seemed as though her family had a written history that only kept repeating itself, until she was old enough to realize she wasn't going to sit down and take that just like everyone else did. Through her childhood abuse Allison felt as though she was unworthy of anything more than what she was getting, but luckily she gained the courage to stand up for herself on her sixteenth birthday when she openly admitted to her step father who had been molesting her and abusing her for years, that she would no longer take it and no longer allow him to touch her. This was the first step in her healing process.

As we discussed in class I think it was important for Allison to write about her life and her troubles in order to put them in the past and move on. Writing is a very well known form of healing and it allows a person to take their issues and no longer keep them imprisoned within themselves. By letting the general public read about her life she is allowing those issues to become public, and not private and held within herself. Now it is the reader's problem, it is their job to sort out the difficulties and understand the mentalities of her writing. She is freed from the grasp of her untold secrets. She talks about her sexuality also, as not being a product of her abuse, but instead being who she is. And I think it takes a lot of courage to discuss something that would probably be on the minds of many people while reading her story. By expressing her emotions and her appeals and imperfections she allows the reader to step back and take a look at their own life and discover things about themselves that they may have, not only been keeping from others, but also keeping from themselves. Her story was self-discovery, and by doing so she was able to release some of the built up issues she kept within herself for so many years.

Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison

I think it would be appropriate for my first blog post about this collection to be about the title and the meaning of the "Two or Three Things I Know For Sure..." passages within the book itself. These passages exist at the end of almost all of the stories Allison tells. Each displays a bit of knowledge, or lack of knowledge, on something relating to her life or the story she's told. Each piece describes something she has learned or something she can't learn due to lack of knowledge, or wanting to know, and leads the reader into a path of thinking for the continuation of the book. I think Allison clues the reader in greatly on their purpose when she writes, "Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear. Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence." (Page 39). In this quote Allison describes how there are things she wants to tell by writing her story that can not be said through any amount of description she can give. I feel as though the "Two or Three Things..." pieces she can get across a story that she cannot tell any other way. It was mentioned in a class of ours that if you take those pieces out of the context of her stories and read them seperately it gives the reading a totally different feel. That "different feel" could very well be the "Story... I wish I could make you hear" that she mentions within her writing. I think it is also important to note that this piece ends a piece about her being unbreakable and not allowed to be beautiful and is a transition into the story of her being raped at the age of five. I feel it is important to note that she is not being dramatic when she says this, but is merely trying to convince the reader that she may know something about being scared or beaten down, or alone. Each one of her bits of knowledge thrown into her story lines acts as a transition between what she's experienced and what she's gained, and shows the reader that there is more to the story than merely what is on the paper.

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick post 3

Motherhood completely changes a woman. Once a woman has a child it is as if the whole world view shifts and becomes only about that child. Another issue is losing that child. Whether it is immediately after birth or at any point after, losing a child is a traumatic experience that a woman may never completely recover from. Especially in the situation Rosa was in. We are never completely told who the father of Magda is, but Stella is convinced Rosa was raped by S.S, and the child was "one of them". However, Rosa denies this. Then, Rosa loses Magda by the hand of an S.S. officer, but she puts the blame on Stella. Magda was the only thing Rosa had that still remained hers. Magda was Rosa's baby and they couldn't take that from her. She lost everything during the holocaust, but she still had Magda. Magda and the Shawl were all that remained in her possession. And that's not to say that all Magda was to Rosa, was a possession, but I think that that was part of it. Magda was something of normality, of innocence, that she could hold onto. And it was taken from her. After that Rosa was never the same. She couldn't move on from the past and admit to herself that her baby is dead. Rosa needed to remember that she was a mother first. She would do anything to protect her baby. And I think she has guilt that she didn't do anything to stop the S.S. from killing her child. She wouldn't have succeeded, obviously, but that doesn't logically help her guilt.

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick post 2

Is Rosa crazy? It is something that is definitely left up to the opinion of the reader. Through out the entire novel Rosa seems to personify her daughter Magda's shawl as being alive and a part of Magda. When she receives the shawl in the mail from Stella, she can't even open it without almost ritualizing the box it came in. She has these illusions, or so it seems, about Magda still being alive. She claims when she smells the shawl it brings Magda back. She appears to be alive and well, living her life, married and working. All of this sort of speaks to Rosa's apparent insanity. She doesn't seem old enough in the novel to be losing her mind, however the things that she was put through during the Holocaust may have aged her more than a normal person, and she was slowly losing a grip on reality. When she meets Persky, she automatically assumes that he is a threat. She thinks that everyone is out to get her in some way. She even thinks that she seems crazy to the people around her, and I think that may have been her admitting that she is. She also explodes on the manager of the hotel on the beach that had barbed wire fences around its perimeter. She couldn't understand that it was just to make it a private beach or private hotel. It is as if normal things that happen within her life, such as meeting people, or common decencies such as keeping a hotel private, are all attacks on her personally. I wouldn't say that Rosa is completely insane. She has reason to feel the way she feels: threatened, worried, lost, confused, sad. She was put through so much torture in her life that anything good seems undeserved or worthless to her. Her insane behavior in reality makes perfect sense.