In Wendy Mass’ novel, A Mango Shaped Space, the main character Mia Winchell is very secretive. Mia Winchell appears to be a typical kid, but she's keeping a big secret, her ability, called synesthesia. Sounds, numbers, and words all have color for her. No one knows, and Mia wants to keep it that way. While Mia was in the principal's office she thought, “I wanted to tell the principal that his name was the color of freshly piled hay. I quickly thought better of it. Even at eighty years old, I was smart enough to realize that something was very wrong and until I figured out what it was, I’d better not get myself in deeper trouble. So I pretended I made everything up,” (4).
Imagine living alone at 16, thousands of miles from your only family, no friends, and trying to gain land of your own. Hattie Brooks did just that, she was always known as Hattie Here-and-There because her parents died when she was young and she was shipped from relative to relative. She was bound to change that. She wanted something of her own, she wanted a home. So, in 1918 after receiving a letter leaving a homestead claim to her from a long lost uncle Chester she packed up all she owned and moved to Montana. She quickly found out how difficult and demanding farm life was. In order to own the land officially she had to prove up which included having to set 480 rods of fence, cultivate one eighth of land, and pay thirty-seven seventy-five
Maria Teresa Mirabal, also known as Mate was born on October 15, 1935. She is the youngest out of all the Mirabal sisters and we mostly get to know her from her journal entries. Mate received her diary from Minerva on the day of her first communion. At school, people would make fun of her for having the diary and would steal it from her. Mate used to think differently about Trujillo as a little girl, she thought he was someone that everyone loved and should be respected. On Benefactor’s Day, she wanted to give Trujillo her best wishes, "I am taking these few minutes to wish El Jefe Happy Benefactor's Day with all my heart. I feel so lucky that we have him for a president." (37) Mate’s sister Minerva starts to get in trouble at school for leaving
Looking out across the stone-paved road, she watched the neighborhood inside the coffee colored fence. It was very similar to hers, containing multiple cookie-cutter homes and an assortment of businesses, except no one was there was her color and no one in her neighborhood was their color. All of them had chocolate skin with eyes and hair that were all equally dark. Across the road to her right, a yellow fence contained honey colored people. She enjoyed seeing all the little, squinted almond eyes, much smaller then her own, which were wide set and round. One little, sunshine colored boy with dark straight hair raised his arm and waved his hand, but before she could do the same back her father called her into the house. His lips were pressed and his body was rigid, the blue of his eyes making direct contact with her
In the short story, “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield, the author introduces Miss Brill as a lonely and a putting on her fur scarf, and getting ready to go to the park. As she sits on the bench and listens to other people talk, she imagines herself as an audience watching the people in the park as if they are on stage. Miss Brill believes that all the action going on in the park, such as the little boy giving the thrown-away violets back to the woman is just a play. However, a closer look at Miss Brill reveals a character that is unable to distinguish between perception and reality.
All her life Janie had lived with her grandmother Nanny, Nanny and Janie were lucky as they had the privilege to live in the yard of white folks. Ever since Janie was growing up she played with white children, It was later that she was confronted with disapproval and was bullied and given many names, so many that everyone started calling her alphabet, "'cause so many people had done named me different names”(68). Shortly she started putting together what she knew of her abnormal individuality. One day she saw herself in a photograph and noticed that she looked distinctive, That she had dark skin, and said, "before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like de rest”(9). Ever since that day, Janie tumbled into somewhat of a descending spiral, setting her off of the path regarding her for own identity. Finally when she had grownup Nanny witnessed her doing something under the pear tree which she believed was distasteful, Nanny hastily prepared a marriage between Janie and a wealthy local man, Logan Killicks. Janie was against her grandmother’s decision. She felt as if she was losing her independence as well as her individuality, she wasn't Janie anymore she would now be ...
A solitary woman sits in conversation with a benign tumour that had just recently been removed from her ovary. As the woman speaks, the inanimate tumour, which she has named Hairball, looks on from its glass encased perch atop the fireplace. The scene is macabre and certainly unusual, but such is the life of Kat, the main character in Margaret Atwood’s short story, Hairball. Kat’s life is filled with the unusual and the shocking, a lifestyle that has been self-imposed. Throughout the years, Kat, an "avant garde" fashion photographer, has altered her image, even her name, to suit the circumstances and the era. Over time Kat has fashioned a seemingly strong and impenetrable exterior, but as Kat’s life begins to disintegrate we discover that the strong exterior is just a facade devised to protect a weak and fragile interior. Kat’s facade begins to unravel and she undergoes significant personal losses; in fact, the losses go so far as to include her identity or lack there of. As Kat begins to lose control, her mental and physical disintegration is hastened by three major conflicts: The conflict with the society in which she lives, the conflict with her romantic interests (specifically Ger), and finally the physical conflict she faces with her own body. In the end, these conflicts will threaten to strip Kat of her lifestyle as well as her name.
Janie’s first discovery about herself comes when she is a child. She is around the age of six when she realizes that she is colored. Janie’s confusion about her race is based on the reasoning that all her peers and the kids she grows up with are white. Janie and her Nanny live in the backyard of the white people that her Nanny works for. When Janie does not recognize herself on the picture that is taken by a photographer, the others find it funny and laughs, leaving Janie feeling humiliated. This racial discovery is not “social prejudice or personal meanness but affection” (Cooke 140). Janie is often teased at school because she lives with the white people and dresses better than the other colored kids. Even though the kids that tease her were all colored, this begins Janie’s experience to racial discrimination.
Everyone has grown up in an environment that has shaped who they are as a person. Poverty-stricken areas shape a person's identity and how they value certain things in life. Sandra Cisneros's character Esperanza is shaped through her struggles with poverty and identity. The novella tells a story how hardships and penury have affected Esperanza as a person and how she yearns for the need of liberation from her poor life on Mango Street. Cisneros's novella The House on Mango Street has taught me that identity is shaped through a person's environment.
Esperanza, a strong- willed girl who dreams big despite her surroundings and restrictions, is the main character in The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. Esperanza represents the females of her poor and impoverished neighborhood who wish to change and better themselves. She desires both sexuality and autonomy of marriage, hoping to break the typical life cycle of woman in her family and neighborhood. Throughout the novel, she goes through many different changes in search of identity and maturity, seeking self-reliance and interdependence, through insecure ideas such as owning her own house, instead of seeking comfort and in one’s self. Esperanza matures as she begins to see the difference. She evolves from an insecure girl to a mature young lady through her difficult life experiences and the people she comes across. It is through personal encounters and experiences that Esperanza begins to become sexually aware and acceptance her place and self-definition in her community.
Stetson’s character in The Yellow Wallpaper comes to want more of what her character potentially is. She did not feel self-fulfilled in her domestic role of wife and mother. This contrasted to her sister-in-law Jennie, who is described as a “perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession.” (p.650) While Stetson’s character happily gives up her domestic functions to Jennie, she is initially passive in her attempt to secure the satisfaction of self-fulfillment: “I did write for a while…. but it does exhaust me a good deal – having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.” (p. 648). Secretly writing in her journal proves to be arduous for the protagonist. Her character, mentally weak and fragile and with no desirable means to be self-fulfilled, succumbs to everything her physician/husband says because “what is one to do?” (p. 638) She is pressured to agree to a “rest cure” for her nervous disorder, although she intuitively knows that this treatment stands in the...
The narrator’s journey into insanity is caused by her husband isolating her from societal influences and also the long period of time in which she was imprisoned without anything or anyone to stimulate her intellect. While some critics may claim that she was insane upon entering the mansion, it is clear that she was able to think and reason well and be able to hypothesize during the first few weeks of her confinement. By feeling demoralized and useless in the presence of her husband, and also not being able to vocalize her own treatment options, she slowly became the incompetent women that needed her husband to dictate her life. In the end, she escaped the realism that she felt was holding her from expressing herself and became an individual not scared to express what she was to her husband.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is told in stream of consciousness style by a woman who is writing diary entry style updates on her experience with the rest cure, a common prescription for the postpartum depression she experiences after the birth of her child. Throughout the story, it becomes obvious that she is using multiple defense mechanisms to deal with her forced isolation. The room with the awful yellow wallpaper once belonged to a boys’ school. In one of her later entries, she notices that the
Signs of the depth of the narrator's mental illness are presented early in the story. The woman starts innocently enough with studying the patterns of the paper but soon starts to see grotesque images in it, "There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a...
Other characters appear to adopt the belief that, like a piece of transparent glass, which is monochromatic until light gleams upon it, Laura can assume the role of any color they seem fit. Consequently, Amanda together takes advantage of the juxtaposi...
The story “A Woman on a Roof” by Doris Lessing, reveals how the protagonist Tom harry and Stanley view women sexually considering their stage of life as a man.