Every person in this world is born with an innate desire to be a part of community. In Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona was never accepted by her foster mother. This made life truly difficult for her, as it would for anyone. In this novel, Ramona will go through multiple challenges. She will be faced with emotional, physical, and spiritual hardships until she feels she is truly happy in her life. In the novel Ramona, who is half white half Indian, is taken in by her foster mother’s sister, who is Spanish. At this time in life, the white European men were just coming to the Americas and taking it over. The Spanish disliked the white Americans and also the Indians. For this reason Senora Moreno, the woman who took Ramona in, never admitted the fact that Ramona was both white and Indian and never accepted …show more content…
Alessandro is the strongest and most beautiful Indian Ramona has ever seen. He is even more handsome than the senora’s son Felipe. When Alessandro and Ramona decide to get married the senora throws a fit and will not accept their marriage. Ramona is forced to leave with Alessandro to go back to his home in Temecula, an Indian village. The new couple is in for a surprise when they realize that the village has been taken over by the white men. The couple must now travel from village to village finding refuge and a place to stay for very short periods of time. They go through cold weather, droughts, the loss of their baby, and eventually all this leads to the insanity of Alessandro. Now Ramona has finally found acceptance in the Indian village, but it shortly fades from her memory as she temporarily loses her feelings, memory and her identity watching her baby die and also watching her husband die. Now Ramona is left with no one except her second child when Felipe comes to her rescue and takes her away from all the suffering and
In the book Between Shades of Gray Ona is a character who is placed in the book to create emotion and a demonstration of motherly grace. One very important way they create These things with her in this book is by using her baby in the equation. As soon as her baby was born she had soviet soldiers stuff her and her baby into a cattle car full of people to take them to who knows where. On this trip in the cattle car no one expected the baby to live and right they were. Once the baby had died Ona was grieving over the child's death by “ Being very quite and not celebrating when they find out the germans were in lithuania!” (Sepetys 69). This adds great emotion and shows great motherly grace in the book by connecting with the people who are reading
In the Lilies of the Field by William E. Barrett, Homer and Mother Maria both display straightforward, hardworking, and stubborn character traits. Firstly, Homer and Mother Maria both display a straightforward personality by being brutally honest about their opinions. For example, when Mother Maria asks Homer to build a chapel, Homer speaks his mind by telling her he does not want to build it. Mother Maria shows her straightforward behavior during Homer’s stay at the convent. One morning, when Homer sleeps in late, Mother to becomes extremely upset and is not afraid to show how she feels about him. Secondly, both Homer and Mother Maria display a hardworking spirit. Homer is a hardworking man because after finally agreeing to build the chapel,
In Elvia Alvarado’s memoir Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart, she expresses the struggles that people such as herself, and numerous other Honduran citizens face every day. Elvia Alvarado was a Honduran woman, who was considered a peasant. She was born into a poor family in the countryside of Honduras. The book retails stories from Alvarado’s life and the obstacles she is forced to overcome in hopes of achieving a better life for herself and the people around her. She faces oppression due to her social class, ideals, and especially her gender. At the same time though, she is able to find support through these communities. While the odds are stacked against Elvia Alvarado, she is able to continuously preserve,
The protagonist is Aja Houston. She grew up in Middletown Delaware. She was the oldest out of three daughters. She considered herself the "experimental “child. Her parents were very young when they started a family. Her mother struggled to graduate high school because she got pregnant with Aja and biological father never step up and decided to stay in the streets collecting drug money. Houston was very lucky that at age two her mother found the man of her dreams and he was said to be one of the greatest gifts god had given her. She had a very special bond with her beautiful mother she was her first child, who she had raised alone for two years with the support of her mother and grandmother. Her mother was a very strong minded independent woman
AP English Literature and Composition MAJOR WORKS DATA SHEET Title: A Raisin In the Sun Author: Lorraine Hansberry Date of Publication: 1951 Genre: Realistic Drama Biographical Information about the Author Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930. She grew up as the youngest in her family. Her mother was a teacher and her father was a real estate broker.
In Margaret Edson’s W;t, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of seventeenth-century poetry, struggles with her diagnosis of stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer. During Vivian’s time in the hospital, two of her main caretakers—Susie, her primary nurse, and Jason, the clinical fellow assigned to her—have vastly different goals for the procedure. The juxtaposition of Jason and Susie, whose values and approaches to life drastically differ, shows the progression of Vivian’s character from one who values knowledge above all else, like Jason, to one who realizes that kindness is the only essential part of life, like Susie.
Strength is a human trait that can be lost and given up to hopelessness just as easily as it was gained. Giovanna Sienna fought through unimaginable struggles her whole life, but her unwavering strength guided her through her life. Giovanna Costa Pontillo Siena from Laurie Fabian’s book Elizabeth Street is portrayed as the stories strongest person. Her determination to get her beloved daughter, Angelina, back and her lack of fear of the kidnappers who blackmailed her for money, reinforce the conception that Giovanna’s tenacity was unable to be matched. She had connections to powerful people in powerful positions, which help her gain a foothold on getting through to the kidnappers. Her love for her family, primarily her daughter, kept her constantly searching for her daughter and any way to get
This book is about a girl name Ellen Foster who is ten years old. Her mother committed suicide by over dosing on her medication. When Ellen tried to go look for help for her mother her father stopped her. He told them that if she looked for helped he would kill them both. After her mother died she was left under her fathers custody. Her father was a drunk. He would physically and mentally abuse her. Ellen was forced to pay bills, go grocery shopping, cook for herself, and do everything else for herself. Ellen couldn't take it any more so she ran away her friends house. Starletta and her parents lived in a small cabin with one small bathroom. One day at school a teacher found a bruise on Ellen's arm. She sends Ellen to live with Julia the school's art teacher. Julia had a husband named Roy. They were both hippies. Julia and Roy cared a lot about Ellen. After Ellen turned 11 years old she was forced to go live with her grandmother. Ellen didn't want to leave Julia and Roy but her grandmother had won custody. Her grandmother was a cruel old lady. Ellen spends the summer with her grandmother. Living with her makes her very unhappy. Since her grandmother owns farmland she forces Ellen to work on the field with her black servants. Ellen meets a black woman named Mavis. Mavis and her become good friends. Mavis would talk about how she knew Ellen's mother and how much Ellen resembled her mother. Her grandmother didn't think the same. She thought that Ellen resembled her father. She also hated that man. Her grandmother would often compare her with her father. Her grandmother would torture her because she wanted revenge from her father. Her grandmother also blames her for the death of her mother. While Ellen was staying with her grandmother her father died. When her father died she didn't feel sad because she had always fantasized about killing her father. Ellen just felt a distant sadness. Ellen cried just a little bit. Her grandmother was furious because Ellen showed some emotions. She told her to never cry again. After that Ellen becomes scarred for a long time. One day her uncle Rudolph bought the flag that had been on Ellen's father's casket. Her grandmother turns him away. Later that day she burned the flag.
Anzaldua grew up in the United States but spoke mostly Spanish, however, her essay discusses how the elements of language began to define her identity and culture. She was living in an English speaking environment, but was not White. She describes the difficulty of straddling the delicate changing language of Chicano Spanish. Chicano Spanish can even differ from state to state; these variations as well as and the whole Chicano language, is considered a lesser form of Spanish, which is where Anzaldua has a problem. The language a person speaks is a part...
A doctor, a firefighter, a teacher, an astronaut: these are the kind of answers children give when asked the infamous question: What do you want to be when you grow up? As you grow older, this repetitive question becomes annoying because it forces you to confront and decide what exactly you want to do when you have been through adolescence. This conundrum is what plagues two characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams.” In this story, Judy Jones and Dexter Green chase after their own dreams and collide multiple times along the way. Jones wants to continue in her current lifestyle of freedom, power, and fame which seems attainable with her charm; however, Jones’ manipulative tendencies make her unappealing to people after a time.
To understand fully the implicit meaning and cultural challenges the film presents, a general knowledge of the film’s contents must be presented. The protagonist, Tita, suffers from typical Hispanic cultural oppression. The family rule, a common rule in this culture, was that the youngest daughter is to remain unwed for the duration of her mother’s life, and remain home to care for her. Mama Elena offers her daughter, Tita’s older sister Rosaura, to wed a man named Pedro, who is unknowingly in mutual love with Tita. Tita is forced to bake the cake for the wedding, which contains many tears that she cried during the process. Tita’s bitter tears cause all the wedding guests to become ill after consuming the cake, and Tita discovers she can influence others through her cooking. Throughout the film, Tita’s cooking plays an important role in all the events that transpire.
First, Anzaldua writes about her experience as a multilingual Chicana, who faced harsh criticism from not only Anglos but also other Spanish speakers (Chicanos and non-Chicanos); an experience that
The play “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry has many interesting characters. In my opinion, the most fascinating character is Ruth because of her many emotions and captivating personality. She goes through extreme emotions in the play such as happiness, sadness, anger, stress, and confusion. Ruth is very independent, firm, kind, witty, and loving.
Like many Chicanos, she developed a strong sense of cultural belonging. This is primarily due to discrimination amongst neighboring Mexicans, whites, and anyone in between. Latinos and latinas would attack her, saying “...cultural traitor, you’re speaking the oppressor’s language, you’re ruining the Spanish language” (Anzaldua 412). It was this ethnic struggle that drove her to latch onto her cultural background so strongly. In the personal narrative “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” by Gloria Anzaldua, Anzaldua states “When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture” (Anzaldua 419) when referring to the resilience of her native people. She states this in response to other cultural groups having abandoned their language, meanwhile they retained theirs. The Chicanos are aware of the harsh standards of North American society. By saying “When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours,” she means that even when other ethnicities have been pushed to eliminate their languages, her ethnicity stayed strong; they refused to cave in. Likewise, when Anzaldua states “We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture,” she draws pride from her culture’s ability to fend off even the most suffocating adversities. In this way, Anzaldua conveys
A boy called Micah The book a company of fools is set in the time of the Black Death where a boy brings hope to a sorry abbey. This boy is Micah, he brought hope to the abbey and taught the monks how to appreciate life. But this character doesn’t start all good, his personality changes dramatically over the course of the book. He certainly brings hope to the abbey in this dark time, but before all this he had quit different character traits and attitudes with his personality.