The three concepts that are shown in the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith are Heterogamy, Race & Ethnicity, and Intimate Partner Violence. These concepts are shown through the main characters in the book. The book talks deals with many things regarding family life and marriage including love, marriage, divorce, race, assimilation and domestic violence. The book centers around Archie Jones and his wife Clara Jones, and their friends Samad Iqbal and Alsana Begum. It also involves their kids. The book is set in London and skips back and forth between the years of 1975 to 2000.
One of the concepts that is shown in the novel White Teeth is Heterogamy. A Heterogamous marriage is when spouses do not share certain social characteristics such as race,
…show more content…
ethnicity, religion, education, age, or social class (Seccombe, 2012). This concept is shown through the marriage of Archie Jones and Clara Jones. Clara and Archie are two very different people and have many different social characteristics.
One of these characteristics is their age. Clara is only 19 years old while Archie is 47 years old, which is a difference of 28 years. In our society today you normally do not see that big of an age gap between husbands and wives, although it does sometimes occur. Another different characteristic that they have is their race. Clara is said to be from Lambeth, England and before that Jamaica, and Archie is said to be an Englishman. This is considered an interracial marriage which stems off of Heterogamy. Clara’s race proves to be a problem in chapter 4 when Archie’s boss tells him that her race made people uncomfortable at the last company even. He offered Archie 50 pounds of luncheon vouchers for him to stop bringing her to company events. A third characteristic that Archie and Clara do not share is their religion. Although Clara eventually abandons her religion, they are still of different religious backgrounds. Clara’s mother is a devout Jehovah’s Witness who sends Clara to Catholic school, which proves difficult to Clara. Clara’s mother tries to get her daughter to help convert people to their religion, which includes her …show more content…
previous boyfriend Ryan Topps. Clara felt that she needed to save him, and her mother also wanted to save him as well. Clara eventually abandons her religion for trendy music and clothes. At the end of chapter 2, she finds herself looking for someone to save her which is when she meets Archie. Clara falls for him despite finding him unimpressive and Archie being so different from her, but they eventually marry and have a daughter named Irie. She also abandons her Jamaican roots to better fit into Archie’s “white culture”. When Clara marries Archie, her mother Hortense disowns her. Even though Archie and Clara are two very different people, they seem to make their marriage work despite the differences. The second concept I chose that is very prevalent in the book is race and ethnicity.
The definition of race is people who share real or perceived physical straits that society deems socially significant such as skin color (Seccombe, 2012). Ethnicity is the shared cultural characteristics such as language, place of origin, dress, food, religion, and other values (Seccombe, 2012). Race and ethnicity play a very big role in the book, especially when talking about the cultures of each of the families in it. In the book, Clara’s race is black and her ethnicity is Jamaican. She would be considered part of a minority group. Samad and his wife Alsana’s ethnicity is Bangladeshi. Their twin sons, Millat and Migid, are also Bangladeshi. In the book, their father wants to send them both back to India. He is becoming immoral himself with seeing another woman and masturbation, so he wants his sons to be more traditional Indian. Tradition and culture was very important to Samad. He says that tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. He didn’t want his sons to be assimilated into English culture, he wants to save them from being immoral like he has become. He realizes that he only has enough money to send one son, and he chooses Migid to send away. Migid does not like his ethnicity, and he wants his family to be more English. Despite Samad sending him to Bangladesh, Migid ends up becoming more like an Englishman rather than
traditional Indian like his father had hoped. Millat, on the other hand started to smoke pot and engage in lots of sexual activity. Eventually he stops this lifestyle and starts becoming more a fundamentalist Islamist. Irie, Archie and Clara’s daughter is biracial, since Archie is white and Clara is black. Later in the book she starts to struggle with knowing her roots and looks to Clara’s mother for answers. The third concept I chose is intimate partner violence. Intimate partner violence is described as violence between those who are physically and sexually intimate, such as spouses or partners. It can also include physical, economic, sexual or psychological abuse (Seccombe, 2012). Intimate partner violence is shown in the relationship between Samad and Alsana. They fight with each other all of the time. They yell, scream, name-call, but they also are physically violent with each other too. They display common couple violence, which is when it arises from a specific argument in which at least one partner lashes out physically (Seccombe, 2012). One example of intimate partner violence is when Samad wants to send their sons to Bangladesh with her blessing. She didn’t want her sons to go to Bangladesh right then because of everything that was going on there. They got into an argument about and Samad slapped Alsana and she then hit him in the stomach and in the cheek. They continued to physically fight while their sons took bets on their fight. Alsana decided to stop speaking to directly to her husband and never saying yes or no and forcing him to live in uncertainty like she did. Another example of intimate partner violence is the verbal abuse that Samad puts Alasana through when he says mean things to her. At one point he says that she’s fat while grabbing her and then makes comments about the way she dresses. At a different time he tells her that she doesn’t know what she is or where she comes from. He also tells her that they don’t see family anymore because he is ashamed to show her to them. Samad and Alsana have a very unhappy marriage, and it results in them using physical and verbal abuse to deal with it. I believe that the three concepts that I chose are all very prevalent in the book, especially race and ethnicity. They represent the different aspects of families and family lives that we have discussed in class.
This is due to the fact that the individual may be going through a stage where their cultures may be contradicting making him feel alienated. One way this is shown in the story is, how the persona, who is half Australian and Chinese, describes his personal appearance by saying, “I caught a glimpse of my poo-brown eyes and flat yellow nose; then I just looked down at my feet as they slunk away”, in this quote we see that the person is describing his personal appearance through imagery, in doing so he is demonstrating his half Asian side. However, we see that he uses emotive language in order to make the reader understand how the boy feels about his appearance. Especially saying how his feet “slunk away”, in other words he is ashamed of his appearance. Later on in the story we see how he describes the Australian kids through, “They had sandy hair, pale freckly skin and blue eyes that could read the board from the back of the room without corrective lenses”. We see in this quote how the he uses imagery to describe them however instead of using poor emotive language he uses a description that practically praises them. In doing so I noticed that the boy hates his Asian side and he thinks looking Australian is better showing how he feels contradicted by his personal image. This teaches me not to be judgmental to bicultural individuals as it may be adding fuel to the
White Oleander is an exciting novel written by Janet Fitch. It is a novel that describes the life of Astrid, a teen girl that had to experience abuse, sexual awakening, grief and occasionally a glimmer of love. Ingrid Magnussen was Astrid's mother, she would play an important role in Astrid life. It is a novel that describes how Astrid's own life experiences and her own intellectual knowledge influences her mind to become a better person in society. This novel created has a double meaning for me because it helps me to realize that I am able to apply what I have learned from other human beings to better myself. This novel also describes the role of women in a "men's world."
When relating the history of her grandmother, Meema, for example, the author first depicts Meema’s sisters as “yellow” and Meema’s grandfather and his family as “white.” When the two families meet, the author has few words for their interactions, stating that their only form of recognition was “nodding at [them] as they met.” The lack of acknowledgment the narrator depicts in this scene, particularly between those of differing skin pigmentations, would indicate a racial divide permeating the society in which
In D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation the interactions between black and white characters represent Griffith’s view of an appropriate racial construct in America. His ideological construction is white dominance and black subordination. Characters, such as the southern Cameron’s and their house maid, who interact within these boundaries, are portrayed as decent people. Whereas characters who cross the line of racial oppression; such as Austin Stoneman, Gus and Silas Lynch, are portrayed as bad. Both Lynch and Lydia Brown, the mulatto characters, are cast in a very negative light because they confuse the ideological construct the most. The mixing of races puts blacks and whites on a common ground, which, in Griffith’s view, is a big step in the wrong direction. Griffith portrays how the relationship between blacks and whites can be good only if the color line and positions of dominance and subordination are maintained. Through the mulatto characters he illustrates the danger that blurring the color line poses to American society.
Racism is a disease that limits the freedom of a group that shares one exact common thing, for example the African-American people in the 1800’s. First example that proves racism limiting the freedom of particular group was presented in the novel, where the majority of the white people thought of black people as slaves and that the black people do not deserve anything in life. In the novel, this was addressed in the beginning of the novel, where Janie who was the “protagonist” in the story that mostly represented the author out of all the characters in the novel, was made fun off and teased when she wore the old clothes that were given to her from her neighbour Mrs. Washburn because her grandchildren did not need them anymore. This shows how the whites view the black people, and how it affected the children as well. This example can be analysed using the social constructivism, where this theory can be used to identify that rac...
The first aspect of Willy's character that affected his failure was his pride. Willy's pride caused him to in many situations make very poor and unethical decisions, that affected both himself and his family. An example of this is through the conversation between Willy and Charley “CHARLEY: ‘You want a job?’ WILLY: ‘I got a job, I told you that. [After a slight pause] What the hell are you offering me a job for?’ CHARLEY: ‘Don’t get insulted.’ WILLY: Don’t insult me.”(DOAS: pg x) Willy does not take the offer which is an obvious example of a poor decision. He makes this decision because he sees this generous whole hearted gesture as a kind of pitiful handout that his pride restricts him from taking. By not taking this handout willy puts his self pride infront of
blockages in the relationships of the characters‘ family ties and their racial issues. The actual
...d and left with little cultural influence of their ancestors (Hirschman 613). When the children inadvertently but naturally adapting to the world around them, such as Lahiri in Rhode Island, the two-part identity begins to raise an issue when she increasingly fits in more both the Indian and American culture. She explains she “felt an intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new”, in which she evidently doing well at both tasks (Lahiri 612). The expectations for her to maintain her Indian customs while also succeeding in learning in the American culture put her in a position in which she is “sandwiched between the country of [her] parents and the country of [her] birth”, stuck in limbo, unable to pick one identity over the other.
By the end of the evening Nick discovers the true personalities of the characters. This paragraph shows a whole new meaning of the color white, in this passage white implies impurity and ?absence of all desire.? (17) Before, however, it implied elegance, innocence and joy. Nick senses that to the Buchanan?s the evening had no great importance, he believes that it would be ?casually put away? (17) and be forgotten. Nick also perceives the woman to be tools of entertainment for the men.
Ann Perkins, Jones’ character, is supposed to be an ethnically ambiguous person and in reality, Rashida is biracial (Glamour). Leslie Knope, the white protagonist of the series, frequently uses words like ‘exotic’, ‘tropical’, and ‘ethnically ambiguous’ when complimenting Ann. The ‘compliments’ also act as the only instances where race is spoken about in reference to Ann’s character. One would believe that Leslie’s constant complimenting of Ann is beneficial to viewers with a biracial identity, but there are some serious problems with Leslie’s behavior. There has been an historical and recent fascination with ‘mixed’ children. This fascination has crossed over into fetishizatoin of biracial or mixed children and people. Biracial people are seen less as people and more as a kind of spice that bell hooks mentions in her work “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” (21). They are something that helps liven up the blandness of the pervasive white culture. Another harmful aspect of Ann’s depiction relates to her class. In Edison’s work, she notes that “biracial individuals living in a middle- and upper-class environments are more likely to be perceived as biracial (rather than black) than those living in working- and lower-class environments” and that “‘color blind’ portrayals of middle- and upper-class Black and biracial characters support the notion that race no longer matters (at least for middle- and upper-class people)” (Edison, 302; 304). Ann’s character is a successful college-educated nurse which is not problematic until one realizes that her race is never truly discussed. This feeds into the stereotype that race does not matter and that all people in the U.S. have the same opportunities. Again, the lack of racial representation leaves one character the duty of depicting a whole group of
Race is an aspect of dominant culture as it is a prejudgment of people’s classes and social standards by the assessment of their skin color. In “The Theme for English B” the author of the poem talks about dominant culture in a school setting from a colored student’s point of view. The colored student feels that separation of the school is a sign of dominant culture: “I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem. I am the only colored student in my class” (Hughes). The student feels isolated from the group because of h...
Mention the concept of polygamy in any “civilized” gathering, and you just may be able to see the shiver of repulsion that ripples through the crowd. By substituting the word “polyamory” in, you will be able to circumvent this reaction – but only because everyone is staring at you in baffled silence instead. So we begin, as always, with definitions.
The language is also used to emphasize the feelings and emotions of Callum and Sephy. The use of descriptive writing is employed by Blackman to give the reader insight into the effects and emotions of racism. “I was talking like my mouth was full of stones – and sharp jagged ones at that.” The book is full of descriptive writing and figurative language with use of similes and metaphors to explore the feelings of Callum and Sephy. The way in which Blackman uses these language techniques influences the reader to especially pity the white race and the way they are treated in the book. Blackman has created her own world to resemble our own op...
Novels often depict realistic situations and outlooks on life. This enables the reader to view and learn about different aspects of life through the author’s depictions. Authors expose world issues and their opinions through their novels and create stories about them. In the novel, The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill exposes the issue of racial discrimination through a fictional character named Aminata. The protagonist is abducted into slavery and experiences hardships, tragedies, oppression, and betrayal. She encounters the many horrors and obstacles of the world in her long journey to freedom. Aminata’s story captures the truth behind other people in terms of their treatment and judgment of the unfamiliar. Hill’s novel effectively exposes
From the beginning of her novel "White Teeth," Zadie Smith presents the reader with realistic, current issues and humor which is significantly complimented by a time-resistant setting. Her word choice brings out a unique and intriguing personality for each character introduced so far in the novel. One of the major themes of the novel so far is the theme of those who endow various trifles, whether miniscule or gigantic these trifles play a huge role in the novels story. The Irony, cynicism, and idiosyncrasy of the novel's tone of the novel makes the narrator quite relatable by being both witty and cynical.