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Introduction on personal identity
Introduction on personal identity
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“They want me to participate in her punishment. And I have.”(16) There is a resounding tone of guilt and irritation in this last page of the first story for the Woman Warrior. Here the reader learns how a child can become a victim, but also involuntarily become a passive advocate of their parent’s moral choices about the past. By not speaking of her aunt or questioning her parents’ silence, Maxine becomes a part of this dead woman’s chastisement.
I find this “reverse ancestor worship” troubling and conceivably damaging. Maxine’s mother sternly lectures that the little girl must not discuss the past of her aunt with others, but now she must wrestle with trying to comprehend what lead to the woman’s death. Unfortunately for Maxine, she suddenly became a part of the punishment and had no way around this when she was young. Why would Brave Orchid tell this story to her young daughter at such an innocent age? An unnerving, fogged story like this does not essentially help an innocent child guide herself through a moral decision.
Charles Taylor has defined personal identity as; “[defined] by the commitments and identifications which provide
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In the first chapter of The Woman Warrior we open up to Maxine first beginning to grasp her own personal moral framework. Disappointingly, this “reverse ancestor worship” whitewashes stories like the one Brave Orchid shares with her daughter because Maxine now cannot reflect back on what has been shared with her. Brave Orchid’s tradition seems to be rooted in “trying to confuse their offspring… [who are] always trying to name the unspeakable”, and so Maxine (and the reader) are left to develop personal ideas about what this story should represent. And although Brave Orchid wants her child to never disrespect her family, she seems to fail to help her offspring catch a grasp of right and wrong after sharing the menacing
True identity is something people must create for themselves by making choices that are significant and that require a courageous commitment in the face of challenges. Identity means having ideas and values that one lives by” (Merton). Concurring with Merton, a person is not given their identity at birth or while developing as an embryo, rather it is something that you create for yourselves over the course of life through decisions and actions made by the individual. Identity is something that one may not be fully aware of or discover until the last breath. Identity can be influenced through associations with others, and environmental factors.
Although this story is told in the third person, the reader’s eyes are strictly controlled by the meddling, ever-involved grandmother. She is never given a name; she is just a generic grandmother; she could belong to anyone. O’Connor portrays her as simply annoying, a thorn in her son’s side. As the little girl June Star rudely puts it, “She has to go everywhere we go. She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day” (117-118). As June Star demonstrates, the family treats the grandmother with great reproach. Even as she is driving them all crazy with her constant comments and old-fashioned attitude, the reader is made to feel sorry for her. It is this constant stream of confliction that keeps the story boiling, and eventually overflows into the shocking conclusion. Of course the grandmother meant no harm, but who can help but to blame her? O’Connor puts her readers into a fit of rage as “the horrible thought” comes to the grandmother, “that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (125).
In Miranda’s poem “Stories I Tell My Daughter,” she describes a girl who defends her identity and her honor when a boy at school questions her. Miranda states, “That day/ I took bloody sticks home to my mother,/ who said she expected nothing less/ from a girl/ who spoke/ to owls” (Indian Cartography 5-6). In the poem, “owls,” a symbol of intelligence and enlightenment, acts as a reminder of the important cultural connection between Native Americans and nature. The girl has reached enlightenment and new found strength because she realizes that she does not have to succumb to the white children’s abuse and she finally reacts to the exploitation. When referring to “mother,” one thinks of a caregiver and nurturer. The mother nurtures the daughter who has learned to defend herself and break social norms in order to protect her cultural identity. Finally, “bloody” implies violence and rage. When discussing indigenous poetry, the violence described typically refers to the bloodshed of the natives; however, ironically the blood in this poem results from an attack on a white person. Though Miranda does not encourage violence, she does encourage action from strong women when their cultural identities are being questioned. Likewise, Trask also connects strong women who break social norms with change. In her poem “Sons,” she addresses the social expectations of women and the familial obligations many of them abide by in their homes. Trask states, “I am slyly/ Reproductive: ideas/ books,/ history/ politics, reproducing/ the rope of resistance/ for unborn generations” (Light in the Crevice Never Seen 55-56). To begin, “resistance” refers to defiance and a refusal to conform. The speaker is assertively stating that she will serve as an activist for future Native Hawaiians who will
Although the concept of identity is recurrent in our daily lives, it has interpreted in various ways.
Haney-Peritz states this manuscript has become a model for feminist writers looking at it through a modern day perspective. The story based on the author’s real life experience draws readers to her cause of the women’s movement (114). Gilman accomplishes the portrayal of a dominated woman by her oppressive husband giving the long-awaited voice to women everywhere.
Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the
...autiful creatures and deserve everything life has to offer. When gathered together, nothing can destroy the strength of a woman. Guidance from parents, at a very young age, can help mold the minds of the young children in today’s society. This world has become overpopulated with greed and hate. The only way to get past the hatred and violence is to love thy neighbor, and protect our young from the unnecessary violence that can be eliminated with love for one another.
The doctrine of self identity is one that has throughout history been a way for people to identify who they were in relation to other individuals and society as a whole. To take into account how an individual’s identity is shaped, it is imperative to know it through the context of oneself and of society. This will not only provide a more holistic approach to understanding how self identity is shaped, but also how it relates to race. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa” and Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” reflect on the idea of racial self identity through harsh critiques from societal and internal pressures seeking to label and categorize people on the basis of race.
Identity, an ambiguous idea, plays an important part in today’s world. To me identity can be defined as who a person is or what differentiates one person from another. Identity would be a person’s name, age, height, ethnicity, personality, and more. A quote by Anne Sexton states “It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was”(Anne Sexton). This quote helps me define identity because I believe it is saying that identity is what people are remembered by. When some people think of identity, words such as, uniqueness, distinctiveness, or individuality may come to mind. However, I disagree with this because when I think of identity I think of mimicry, self-consciousness, or opinions.
What is identity? Identity is an unbound formation which is created by racial construction and gender construction within an individual’s society even though it is often seen as a controlled piece of oneself. In Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’, Tatum asserts that identity is formed by “individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political contexts” (Tatum 105). Tatum’s piece, “The Complexity of Identity: ‘Who Am I?’” creates a better understanding of how major obstacles such as racism and sexism shape our self identity.
What is personal identity? This question has been asked and debated by philosophers for centuries. The problem of personal identity is determining what conditions and qualities are necessary and sufficient for a person to exist as the same being at one time as another. Some think personal identity is physical, taking a materialistic perspective believing that bodily continuity or physicality is what makes a person a person with the view that even mental things are caused by some kind of physical occurrence. Others take a more idealist approach with the belief that mental continuity is the sole factor in establishing personal identity holding that physical things are just reflections of the mind. One more perspective on personal identity and the one I will attempt to explain and defend in this paper is that personal identity requires both physical and psychological continuity; my argument is as follows:
Scyld’s motherlessness perhaps tells the reader that the heroic, superhuman, violent deeds about to transpire are perhaps not all that compatible with women and womanly qualities like passivity, gentleness, compassion. It is a predominantly masculine, rough and tough narrative which would only be detrac...
Pearson, Patricia. When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. New York: Viking, 1997
...can go through an entire lifetime and not really know how to define their own identity. In many cases people suffer through a great crisis to discover who they really are. If someone doesn?t know the meaning of their own identity, how can society apply a definition to the word? It leaves people to ponder whether or not there are some feelings and parts of life that simply cannot be explained. When defining the word identity scholars and common men alike must agree to disagree. It is a word so diverse in context that it is seemingly impossible to take it down to a simplified definition. There are some things in life that just aren?t meant to be completely understood, and one?s identity is among these things. Not until a person has a lived out their live could they sit down and tell you how their adventure has shaped them into the person they became in the end.
It has been said that the inner workings of a woman’s mind is truly an enigma, and I tend to agree. At any point, women’s hopes, dreams, silent sufferings, internal battles, and undisclosed desires may play a role in how they live their lives and do the things they do. In addition to those aspects of the complicated state of being a woman, becoming a mother can completely change a woman’s viewpoint on many things, as it has for me. Through the author’s use of setting, symbolism, and dynamic characters, the allegorical nature of certain stories in literature give insight on the plight of women - which may be interpreted differently by different people. Myself, as a woman and a mother can empathize with the fictional yet seemingly realistic,“round” female characters in the stories The Shawl, A Jury of Her Peers, The Worn Path and Two Kinds, whereas a woman who is not a mother, or a man might not form the same type of empathy.