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Essay on socio-cultural issues
Essay on socio-cultural issues
Socio cultural issues
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“The Lesson” and “Gorilla, My Love” were written in the 1970’s by Toni Cade Bambara, a female African American writer. In both “The Lesson” and “Gorilla, My Love” the stories are told in first person narration by young black girls who tell the story of their struggles. Sylvia in The Lesson is about twelve or thirteen years old. She comes from an urban neighborhood in Harlem and is being raised in a single parent home, as her mother finds more interest in hanging out with her friends leaving Sylvia to raise herself with guidance from the streets. One summer day Miss Moore, an educated black woman in the community who believes in the value of education takes the children on an educational outing to F.A.O Schwartz in hopes of teaching them the importance of education, economic inequality, socioeconomic class and the value of working hard to achieve their goals in life. On the other hand, Hazel in “Gorilla, My Love” is about a eight or nine years old. She comes from a middle class neighborhood and is being raided in a two parent home. Hazel hits a hardship when she is betrayed, once by her uncle as he decides to no longer be referred to as Hunca Bubba, but instead by his given name Jefferson Windsong Vale, and secondly when she anticipated seeing a movie called Gorilla My Love which had nothing to do with gorillas, instead what was playing was King of Kings a movie about Jesus.
The thrilling book The Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls and the movie by Walt Disney are alike in some ways but drastically different in other ways. There were different characters, endings and beginnings, and even different plot organization.
The Piano Lesson written by August Wilson is a work that struggles to suggest how best African Americans can handle their heritage and how they can best put their history to use. This problem is important to the development of theme throughout the work and is fueled by the two key players of the drama: Berniece and Boy Willie. These siblings, who begin with opposing views on what to do with a precious family heirloom, although both protagonists in the drama, serve akin to foils of one another. Their similarities and differences help the audience to understand each individual more fully and to comprehend the theme that one must find balance between deserting and preserving the past in order to pursue the future, that both too greatly honoring or too greatly guarding the past can ruin opportunities in the present and the future.
The narrator Sylvia and the children in her impoverished neighborhood are prisoners in a dark cave, which is the society that encompasses ignorance and puppet-handlers. “The Lesson” begins with Sylvia as she talks condescendingly about her neighborhood of Harlem, New York: “Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup. Quite naturally we laughed at her… And we kinda ha...
The two novels, Animal Farm, written by George Orwell and The Sky So Heavy, by Claire Zorn explore the theme of oppression through characterisation. Animal Farm is a novella depicting the lead up to the Russian Revolution, with characters from the events taking part in the story as animals. In The Sky so Heavy, Finn and his peers are stranded in a nuclear winter, hopelessly trying to source food for survival. The characterisation of Napoleon in Animal Farm and Finn in The Sky So Heavy both portray similar oppression through their speech. Napoleon portrays oppression when he states, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (90), similarly to Finn; “our world was made from the dull light filtered through the gauze
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines takes place in Louisiana in the 1940’s. When a young African American man named Jefferson is unfairly sentenced to death, school teacher Grant Wiggins is sent to try to make Jefferson a man before he dies. Throughout the novel, racial injustice is shown in both Jefferson and Grant’s lives in the way other people view them.
Hazel is the main character and narrator of "Gorilla, My Love," by Toni Cade Bambara. She is between the ages of ten or twelve years old and an African American girl living in Harlem, New York with her family. While riding in the car with her grandfather, her uncle Jefferson Winston Vale, aka Hunca Bubba, and her little brother in the beginning of the story story's, she learns that Hunca Bubba, is in love and plans to be married. This angers Hazel, and she thinks back to an Easter Sunday when she and her brothers went to the movies.
To start off the first difference that I noticed between the stories was the age that the characters matured and the person who taught them. Sylvia is taught a lesson while she is still very young, when reading the text you can assume that Sylvia is between 10 and 13 years old. Sylvia was taught a lesson as child by an adult. The lesson Miss Moore was trying to teach her was that getting an education is key for them to change their lives and have a better future for themselves. On the other hand, in “Sonny’s Blues” the narrator is an adult, and we can assume he is around the age 30 because he has two kid, a wife, and is a school teacher. Unlike In “The Lesson”, the narrator is taught a lesson as an adult, by someone who is younger than him. The lesson that the narrator is taught is that, all the struggles his brother has gone through he expresses them through his
Bambara’s short story, “The Lesson,” published in 1972 in her collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love, was definitely a product of cultural and social issues of the time. Sparked by prejudices of race, class, and society, many of Bambara’s works deliberately incorporate colloquial language as a way to educate the reader of the issues poor, uneducated African Americans living in urban areas of the United States have to deal with on a daily basis. While “The Lesson” focuses more on the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States, her stories are generally focused more broadly on the lives and injustices facing African Americans. Bambara’s stories tend to feature adolescent, black children, from underprivileged and uneducated backgrounds. In this compilation of short stories, the narration is generally in first...
The lessons that are taught through experience are usually the ones that stick with children for a lifetime. In Toni Cade Bambara's “The Lesson”, Miss Moore, a prominent character in the story, teaches a lesson to underprivileged children growing up in Harlem. Bambara's work is described as “stories [that] portray women who struggle with issues and learn from them.” (Vertreace, Par. 48) Bambara uses Miss Moore and her characteristics to teach Sylvia and the other children about social inequality and the idea of pursuing personal aspirations regardless of social status. Miss Moore has many admirable characteristics; she's intelligent, patient and caring.
Throughout “The Lesson” and “Sonny’s Blues” many hardships have been placed on the characters due to their social status and where they come from. The characters had to deal with factors of poverty and even violence as a child growing up in the tough streets of Harlem. In “The Lesson” the main character and narrator Sylvia lives in the Harlem ghetto, and experience life on the rough side of town. We can infer that Sylvia and her family don’t have much money when Sylvia says “And Miss Moore asking us do we know what money is like we a bunch of retards” (). In “Sonny’s Blues”, the narrator and Sonny has grown up in Harlem, living in poverty and violence as well. Giving a vivid image of the streets they grew up on, the narrator states “So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood” (). The characters in both stories have unstable family
"The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara is not just a spirited story about a poor girl out of place in an expensive toy store, it is a social commentary. "The Lesson" is a story about one African-American girl's struggle with her growing awareness of class inequality. The character Miss Moore introduces the facts of social inequality to a distracted group of city kids, of whom Sylvia, the main character, is the most cynical. Flyboy, Fat Butt, Junebug, Sugar, Rosie, Sylvia and the rest think of Miss Moore as an unsolicited educator, and Sylvia would rather be doing anything else than listening to her. The conflict between Sylvia and Miss Moore, "This nappy-head bitch and her goddamn college degree" (307), represents more than the everyday dislike of authority by a young adolescent. Sylvia has her own perception of the way things work, her own "world" that she does not like to have invaded by the prying questions of Miss Moore. Sylvia knows in the back of her mind that she is poor, but it never bothers her until she sees her disadvantages in blinding contrast with the luxuries of the wealthy. As Miss Moore introduces her to the world of the rich, Sylvia begins to attribute shame to poverty, and this sparks her to question the "lesson" of the story, how "money ain't divided up right in this country" (308).
...n character. The story begins by informing the reader that the boy Ragged Dick is a honest boy who has solid morals, yet this directly goes against his actions as he steals the wallet and turns violent as he beats up another boy. I feel that there are very few failures within Bambara's “The Lesson” as the main story is solid and consistent throughout. In the end, both stories are driven my money which is attributed to success. My final thoughts are that money is not what drives success. I feel that money can make becoming successful an easier task; however, it is true perseverance which holds the most power. Ultimately, both stories express that an education is the most valuable asset for individuals to have as it can help them achieve bigger better things while ultimately allowing them to become financially well off, successful and blessed with opportunities.
Reading a book once in a while helps us from being ignorant from the outside world. Readers many times dare to compare and discuss about the books that they have read. This works when we read two master pieces of literature that could be very similar and in the same time very different stories. I had the great fortune of reading the screenplay of “To Kill a Mockingbird” as well as the part of the memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. After reading these two great pieces of literature I dare to compare the main characters, Scout from “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Maria from “I know why the caged bird sings”. The main intentions of this two books are to teach lesson to their readers whether they could be children or adults.
Point of view is an essential element to a reader's comprehension of a story. The point of view shows how the narrator thinks, speaks, and feels about any particular situation. In Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson," the events are told through the eyes of a young, mischievous girl named Sylvia who lives in a lower class neighborhood. The reader gets a limited point of view of view because the events are told strictly by Sylvia. This fact can influence the reader to see things just as she does. The strong language gives an unfamiliar reader an illustration of how people in the city speak. Bambara does this to show the reader that kids from lower class neighborhoods are affected by their environment due to lack of education and discipline, that how different one part of society is from another, and that kids learn from experience. We also get an insight of Sylvia’s feisty, rebellious nature and her lack of respect towards people with an education.
The narrator of the story is a young, black girl name Sylvia and the story is also told from her perspective. The setting is not clear. Perhaps it started in Harlem and then to downtown Manhattan on Fifth Avenue and the time of the story took place is also unclear. Bambara uses a great deal of characterization to describe the characters in the story. For example, Bambara describes Miss Moore as “black as hell” (Bambara 330), “cept her feet, which were fish-white and spooky” (Bambara 330), and “looked like she was going to church” (Bambara 330). She later tells us that she’s been to college and her state of mind is she believes it’s her responsibility for the children’s education. The plot started when Miss Moore rounded up all of the children by the mailbox. Then she gets the kids in a cab and took them to Fifth Avenue to a big toy store where the rich people would shop. The story then continues with the children and Miss Moore in the toy store and the kids looking around and noticing they can’t afford anything. Which will soon end the plot with a lesson that society is not fair, “that this is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal chance to purse happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don’t it?”(Bambara 330). Hence, the lesson Miss Moore is trying to teach these