American Literature

I have enjoyed this class greatly. I have come to understand that American Literature changed a lot through the years. Everyone wrote about different things and the readers interpret the writings differently. Reading the stories this semester (and last) have brought me to appreciate not only the writing of the past, but also history. Knowing history and what happened in different times helps to understand the stories better. Reading the story "Bright and Morning Star" I had no idea what movement they were referring to so i had to go look it up and find out.

I have come to realize that literature is history- no matter where or by whom it is written. I enjoyed the readings- all of them. All of the stories were either funny, horrific or just plain interesting. A Good MAn is Hard to Find and The Witness were my favorite because they left me with a sense of disbelief. I had to tell someone about these stories becuase they left me with the question of, "Why?"

I have to say that this semester, I really didnt enjoy writing. I had a hard time taking the material and relaying a thought about it on paper. Overall, the American Literature classes have made me look at reading and writing in a whole new light.

A Disaster: Essay 1

This is my worst and least favorite essay. I thought that what I was trying to convey was coming out but apparently i didn't do a very good job. I would definitly not think about the story as hard as I was. I would try to look at it the way that Sylvia would. This is the revised version- minus the references to abused women- which was the subject that was way off base to compare to this story.

Decisions

In “A White Heron” by Sarah Orne Jewett we meet a young lady who has to make a decision as to whether or not she will reveal the location of a local heron to a bird hunter, or keep the location a secret and not receive the large reward she has been promised. This decision is one that takes time to reach, but once she made it, it “made all the difference” (Frost 1061).

Sylvia is a small girl who goes out every night to retrieve the family cow. She takes her time and enjoys her walk home. One day she meets a young man who is an avid bird hunter and desperately wants to find a sly heron. He hasn’t been able to locate the bird since he spotted it, but Sylvia has seen the bird several times. She had suspicions about the hunter but she keeps them to herself because the stranger interests her.

She follows the young man throughout the following day as if she was pondering nothing at all. Sylvia follows behind the hunter and watches to see how he reacts to and treats the birds, which is what a battered woman does once she starts to think about leaving her abuser. Sylvia doesn’t understand why or how the hunter can hurt and kill the things that he cares so much about. The hunter even tries to entice Sylvia with a reward, something a lot of batterers do to their victims, in order to get the outcome that he desires.

Sylvia sees the perks to taking this reward but is still hesitant about the hunter. She knows that it would be easier to take the money and tell the hunter where the bird is, just like the victim may think that the easier “road” would be to stay in her situation. She wants to make sure that she makes the right decision, so she takes her time and looks at all the aspects of the situation that she is in. The battered victim may look for ways and resources that could help her get out or look for reasons that she should stay, but Sylvia went to see the heron.

Sylvia climbs a large tree to locate the bird in the silence of the night. She wants to locate the bird in order to give its location away or find a reason not to keep her secret. She spies it and together they watch the sunrise. Sylvia realizes that the life of the heron is more important than the money that the hunter is willing to give her. Sylvia and the victims that leave decided that “the road less traveled” (Frost 1061) is the better route to take than the road highly traveled.

Sylvia takes the route that most people would have avoided. She thought about what the heron meant to life as a whole and how they connected that morning watching the sunrise together. She felt a connection with it and didn’t want that connection to be broken for a small monetary reward. For Sylvia, allowing the hunter to leave without telling him where the heron resided was her way of allowing herself to live without the guilt and loss of a loved one: the heron.

Works Cited
Frost, Robert. The Road Not Taken. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Vol. D. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 1061. Jewett, Sarah Orne.

A White Heron. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Vol. C. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 695-701.

A Challenging Experience: Essay 2

This peice, I would have to say, was my greatest challenge. I wanted to make sure that I got a few of the pieces that we read into the essay but have it make since. I had two of my family members read it before I posted and one said that it was an "F." I thought I would die. She siad it made no sense at all but I knew what I was trying to say. I went back and revised it and got a decent grade; definitly not an "F!" LOL!!

Why America?

People come to America from all over the world to tour such places as the Grande Canyon, Yellowstone Park, Washington, D.C., and the Mall of America, but a great number of people come simply for a new start or a better life. “The Melting Pot” is what America is referred to, “the land of the free, “the land of opportunity.” What type of living conditions would one have to be in, in order for all of them to come to America, a foreign land, usually hundreds of miles away from their homeland, without knowing a full sentence of English, how they were going to get a job, or where their next meal would come from? What type of misconceptions could linger throughout other countries that have such strongholds on people's thoughts about how great our country is?

In “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair a young man by the name of Jurgis falls in love with a woman named Ona. He wants desperately to marry her but her father refuses to accept his proposal. Jurgis goes home empty handed and tries to forget about Ona but he can’t. A year and a half later he returns to her hometown to find that Ona’s father has died and her family, which consists of six children and four adults, has lost everything. Ona’s brother, Jonas, “suggested they all go to America” (Sinclair 609). It was a country “where, they said, a man might earn three roubles a day; and Jurgis figured what three roubles a day would mean, with prices as they were where he lived” (Sinclair 609), and thought that if he went there he would become a rich man. “He decided forthright that he would go to America” (Sinclair 609). Jurgis and Ona’s family never took the time to find out if what they heard about America was true.

In America could a man, rich or poor, be free and obtain things for free? In “The Promised Land” by Mary Antin it was said that “light was free….music was free…Education was free” (824) and the children and adults within Russia believed these things without question. Did he “not have to pay out his money to rascally officials” or “join the army” (Sinclair 609) as was the thought in The Jungle? Jonas, Ona’s brother, knew of a man who had gone to America and made it rich in the stockyards in Chicago, but he and the others had no idea what a stockyard was. They also didn’t know any English and couldn’t figure out why people “looked perplexed, or laughed, or went on without paying them any attention” (Sinclair 610) when they spoke the one word that they knew in English, “Chicago,” once they reached their destination.

Jurgis never stopped to think about the dollar to rouble ratio or what the cost of living was in America. There was no questioning the type of jobs that were available or that would need to be performed in order to make three roubles a day. There were no conversations about the language that they would need to learn in order to function properly once they made it to “the land of the free.” Jurgis simply “sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and tramped nearly four hundred miles from home with a gang to work upon a railroad” (Sinclair 610) where he was able to obtain eighty roubles, the cost for the family to travel over the sea, and have some left over.

The whole family learned the hard way that life in America isn’t always what people make it out to be. Jonus, Ona, and Jurgis stepped out in blind faith just as many immigrants did and still do today. The sad thing about this situation is that most immigrants are blind sided by reality that America is not only just like home but sometimes worse.

Works Cited
Antin, Mary. ”from The Promised Land”. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Vol.C. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 823-829.Sinclair, Upton. ”The Jungle”.

The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Vol. C. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 608-621.

Almost a Masterpiece: Essay 3

I loved this assigment compared to the others and therefore this turned out to be my best essay. I took my time to find out about abortion from the past to the present. It interested me knowing people who have had abortions and being one who actually thought about having one. I wanted to know if the rumors were true. I found out that most of them are.

A Decision

Many women in the world today, and in the world of yesteryears, have had abortions. Women sometimes feel that it is the best thing to do, while others are pressured into making this lifelong decision. Some women and their significant others talk about what needs to be done when they find out that she is “with child,” but even then the women feel like they are being convinced to do something that they may not want to do. In Earnest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants a young woman, by the name of Jig, and her companion talk about an abortion. They seem to be discussing the pros and thinking about the cons of having such a procedure performed. We are going to look at the history of abortions, and then the pros and cons that Jig and her partner may have been discussing.

Most people in the 1800’s didn’t realize that there was an egg and sperm involved in the conception process, so they believed that “life began at about four months, when the mother felt the baby move in her stomach” (Shenkmen); others thought that it was practically dead till it breathed (Storer). As Richard Shenkman stated in his essay,
Many otherwise good and exemplary women, would rather part with their right hands or let their tongues cleave to the roof of the mouth rather than to commit a crime, seem to believe that prior to quickening it is no more harm to cause the evacuation of the contents of their wombs than it is that of their bladders of their bowels. (Shenkman)
For this reason, “abortion has been performed for thousands of years, and in every society that has been studied” (History of Abortion[use title]).

Abortion “was legal in the United Stated from the time the earliest settlers arrived. At the time the Constitution was adopted, abortions before ‘quickening’ were openly advertised and commonly performed” (Anonymous). It wasn’t until the early 1800’s that scientists found that human life didn’t begin at the time of ‘quickening’ but at conception when egg met sperm. “By 1860, 85% of the population lived in states which had prohibited abortion with new laws" (Willke). These laws moved the felony punishment from quickening to conception. There are now laws throughout the world that govern when and if a woman can have an abortion.
Because of the laws that prohibited abortions, many women went to private doctors to have abortions done; others went to “untrained practitioners who performed abortions with primitive methods or in unsanitary conditions” (Anonymous). Some women went to the extreme of trying to self-induce their pregnancies. From these attempts and “back-alley abortions” many women suffered from serious medical problems including death from the procedure or from infections that set in from the unsanitary conditions the abortions were performed in; becoming sterile; becoming emotional unstable- which can “lead to insanity in women from the physical shock of an induced abortion, or from subsequent remorse” (Storer).

There are some advantages to women who have an abortion. They do not have to worry about going through the delivery process of hours, if not days, of labor. They don’t have to worry about purchasing baby supplies, or re-budgeting their incomes to fit the needs of a new body in the home. Their lives are not disheveled by being awakened in the middle of the night by loud cries of an egocentric person. This may be the reason that Jig says she has known people who have done it and “afterward they were all so happy” (Hemingway 1423), but are these women really happy or just putting on a facade?

As we can tell by the conversation between the two characters in the story, there is a lot of emotion and thought that goes into the decision of terminating a pregnancy. Jig and her partner’s dialog have moments when you can feel the tension building up between them:

“And we could have all this,’ she said. ‘And we could have everything and everyday we make it more impossible.”
“What did you say?”
“I said we can have everything.”
“We can have everything.”
“No, we can’t.”
“We can go everywhere.”
“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more” (Hemingway 1424).

The two go through this throughout the whole story. We can sense that Jig doesn’t want to go through with it, but she also doesn’t want to lose her partner. “And then we’ll be all right and happy”. “and if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me” (Hemingway 1423)? The fact that she is pregnant has caused a strain on the relationship. The man seems to think that an abortion “is the best thing to do” (Hemingway 1423), and that is just as natural as a normal delivery. “It’s really not anything. It’s just to let in the air” (Hemingway 1423) is what he tells her, but we know that the “simple operation,” as he calls it, is far more than that.

In their conversation we also see that her partner wants her to have the procedure done but wants it to seem as though it will be her decision. “‘You’ve got to realize,’ he said, ‘that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you’” (Hemingway 1424). This seems the norm in that time, and even now. Early feminists wrote against abortions and blamed not only circumstances, and laws for driving women to abortions, but also men. “Matilda Joslyn Gage wrote in 1868, ‘I hesitate not to assert that most of this crime of child murder, abortion, infanticide, lies at the door of the male sex…” (Lewis).

The decision that this couple has to make is one that was illegal at this period in time. They probably would be going to someone who had no kind of medical training, and Jig would be one in the thousands that would be seen suffering from the many “side effects” of having a back-alley abortion.

The decision to take an unborn child from the womb is one that takes a lot of consideration, not only for the life of the child but also the life of the mother. Many people think, just as Jig’s partner, that an abortion is a simple procedure that is just as natural as regular childbirth. The thing that they need to know is that most women suffer greater consequences by having an abortion than by having a beautiful child. Jig had to make this lifelong decision in order to get her “hills like white elephants” back by aborting the baby; we just have to hope that she didn’t succeed.

Works Cited
History of Abortion. National Abortion Federation. 12 April 2006. http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/history_abortion.html

Hemingway, Ernest. Hills Like White Elephants. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Vol. D. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 1422-1425.

Lewis, Jone Johnson. “A Brief History of the Abortion Controversy in the United States.” Abortion History. 12 April, 2006.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/abortionuslegal/a/abortion.htm

Shenkman, Richard. History of Abortion in the United States. Harper & Rowe, 1998. 14 April, 2006. http://www.holysmoke.org/fem/fem0420.htm

Storer, Horatio Robinson. Why Not? A Book for Every Woman. The American Medical Association. 1868. 13 April, 2006. http://www.abortionessay.com/files/storer.html.

Willke, J. C.. Why Can’t We Love Them Both: Legal Pre-Roe. Heritage House 76, Inc 1998. 12 April, 2006. http://www.abortionfacts.com/online_books/love_them_both/why_cant_we_love_them_both_7.asp#When%20did%20the%20first%20state%20legalize%20abortion?