Download miễn phí Luận văn Discuss some of the most prominent aspects of the culture and society of the mainstream American in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
From all the literary works I have had chances to read, I have the same feelings for the American women, who share many things in common as very modern, practical, strong-headed women who have new concepts of love, thirst for love and try their best to achieve true love.
In the short story Watermelon Days selected in The Best American Short Story 2002, Tom McNeal draws a picture of an American woman in the late 1920s. Doreen Sulivan, a beautiful woman from Philadelphia, had an appearance which was a fashion of the day with “a thin, sleeveless dress over a light camisole, her bobbed hair was marceled into deep horizontal waves, she wore a wide ribbon in her felt cloche She also used a scarlet lipstick to form her lips into a fresh cupid bow ” (McNeal, as cited in Kenison and Miller, 2002, p. 211). The way Doreen dressed up and wore make-up represents a revolutionary trend of the rebellious American flappers in the so-called Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. Traditionally, women wore long dress, long hair and very light make-up. On the contrary, the rebellious flappers wore dresses which exposed their hands and legs down from the knee. Their long hair was cut short and even bobbed. The year 1926, which the story dates back to was a turning point in American fashion when camisoles, short dresses, bobbed hair under cloche hats and heavy make-up were in their hey-day. What the flappers wanted was to show themselves to be very young, modern, strong and different from traditional American women of the time. Doreen, with her modern appearance raised the curiosity of the people in Yankton, the town which she came to for a job. And also in Yankton, she got married to a radio reporter who proposed to her only five weeks after their first meeting.
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ights movement in the 1960s that resulted in the 1964 Civil Rights Act which transformed the American society in the late twentieth century and the century to come. Nevertheless, we have not learnt many of the illustrative evidences for racial discrimination itself.
In his wonderful short story Big Boy leaves home first published in 1936, Richard N. Wright provides us with a vivid illustration for racial discrimination set in Southern America in the early twentieth century. The story begins with a lively scene of the four black boys Bobo, Lester, Buck and Big Boy, the main character, who are as naughty and lovely as any boys in the world walking “lollingly in bare feet, beating tangled vines and bushes with long sticks” (Schorer, p.885), twitting each other in a swimming hole in the woods after playing truant from school. From the bottom of their heart, they always dreamt of the train that could bring them to the North which was said to have equal rights for the colored folks. “They counted each train passed by and began to sing the song about “a train bound for glory””. While singing the song, they felt a bright future ahead. Wright draws a lively picture with “A black winged butterfly hovered at the water’s edge. A bee droned. From somewhere came the sweet scent of honey suckles. Dimly they could hear sparrows twittering in the woods. They rolled from side to side, letting sunshine dry their skin” (Schorer, p. 893). Unfortunately, the black boys’ happy time did not last long until they were found naked by a white woman. In a normal situation, the woman is supposed to be shy and run away. But the woman in Wright’s story screamed panickly as if she was seeing four monsters. “You go away! You go away! I tell you go away!” (Schorer, p. 894), she shouted even when Big Boy said very politely: “Lady, we wanna git our closes.” (Schorer, p. 894) The climax of the whole story arises when the woman’s fiancÐ appeared and immediately shot the four boys. Lester and Buck died. Bobo was extremely terrified but Big Boy got the riffle and shot him to death. What the woman and her fiancÐ did to the four innocent boys represents what the white did to the colored. The black were treated like animals. They would be killed at any time, for any reasons. The more extreme segregation is depicted in the barbarous punishment the white gave to Bobo, one of the escaped. As Big Boy could see while he was running away from his hometown, the white men burnt Bobo and “A black body flashed in the light. Bobo was struggling, twisting, they were binding his arms and ligs.” Bobo’s arms and ligs were bound symbolizes the fate of the black was bound. No matter they struggled, they would be killed. The injustice and barbarian of the society of the time is shown in the death of the three black innocent boys and the exhausting flee of Big Boy paid for the nonsensical fear of a white woman.
The severe segregation is also revealed in the memoir Prime Time by Henry Louis Gates Jr. when he recalled the murder of the fourteen-year-old Emmette Till in August 1955 in Mississippi after his friends dared him to ask out a white woman. “He whistled at some white girl…that’s all he did. He was beat so bad that they didn’t want to open the casket.” (Gates, as cited in Chin. et al, 2002, p. 1092). For the American and the world, the murder of Emmett Till was an international issue. It is well-known that three days after Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a store clerk, he was weighted down by a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire by Carolyn’s husband and her half-brother. They mutilated his face so terribly that his uncle Wright could only identify the body basing on the ring worn on a finger of the dead body. If it had been a white man to whistle at Carolyn, the situation wouldn’t have been so bad. This degrading discrimination was not the first of its kind but it was an alarming point that put the black people in America on fire for justice and peace.
Throughout the memoir, Gates provides us with variety of evidences of the segregation of the time. “For most of my childhood, we couldn’t eat in restaurants or sleep in hotels, we couldn’t use certain bathrooms or try on clothes in stores…Even after basketball games, the colored players had to stand around and drink out of paper cups while the white players and cheerleaders sat down in the red Naugahyde booths and drank out of glasses ” (as cited in Chin et. al, 2002, 1087) Gates gives an example of his family being avoided from sitting down at the Cut-Rate, a restaurant in town, which had a permanent TAKE AWAY ONLY sign for the colored people. Only Gates’s father was not stopped from sitting down. As Gates explained, it was in part because his father had lighter complexion. At this stand we can see that the reason was only the matter of black or white. The lighter one’s complexion was, the more chances for him or her to use public service. Another example of Carl Dadisman, who had vowed not to integrate, was given to support Gates’ irony of discrimination. Carl Dadisman was a proprietor who ran the taxi service, therefore, he tried to behave nicely, even to the colored. However, he did not want the colored to sit in his booths, eat off his plates and silverware or put their “thick greasy lips” over his glasses. Gates’s satire arouse in the way he described the death of Carl. Carl died because of a heart attack in a tiny toilet of his own place of business. “Daddy and some other men tried to lift him up, while he was screaming and gasping and clutching his chest, but he was stuck in that cramped space.” (as cited in Chin et. al, 2002, 1088). Why Carl had such heart attack in such a “relaxing” place is not given but we can understand that he was
“attacked” by his own prejudice for his “cramped” mind. Lowell, a black brilliant soccer player came to saw the toilet to Giúp him but it seemed hopeless. Carl cried, moaned and died. Then Gates says that “By then it made little difference to Carl that Lowell was black.” Yet, it is so ironic that not until a “white” dies that his prejudice of black or white might be blurred.
Like in Big Boy Leaves Home, the colored people in Gates’s memoir also show their thirst for equality. This thirst is embedded in their excitement to see the shows on television such as “the all-colored world of Amos and Andy” which is full of black lawyers, black doctors and nurses. “We were starved for images of ourselves and searched TV to find them.” (p.1089) But for other fields, the colored people were well-known for their sport ability. This is the reason why the people in Piedmont, where Gates spent his childhood, kept track of every sport programs which the colored played in. “We’d watch the games day and night, and listen on radio to what we couldn’t see.” (p.1089) and “Colored, colored, on Channel Two.” (p.1091)All these thirst and excitement to see their own images and success reveal the desire of the colored people to be recognized in the society. They wanted to have the same stand and to enjoy the same lives as the white. “With a show like Topper, I felt as if I was getting a glimpse, at last, of the life that Mrs. Hudson, and Mrs. Thomas…must be leading in their big mansions… Smoking jackets and cravats, spats and canes, elegant garden parties and martinis… This was a world of so elegantly distant from ours, it was like a voyage to another galaxy.” (p.1090) By then, all the advantages seen on television that the white came in for seemed “just out of reach” of the colored in Piedmont in West Virginia. In the third part of the memoir, Gates gives us lively facts of the Civil Rights movement, of the black children integrated into Little Rock high school in Arkansas, of the soldiers from the National Guard and the state police who surrounded these black children and how the people in Piedmont reacted to the news. Nonetheless, all these facts were seen only on television. The people in Piedmont still had to face with segregations.
While in Gates’s nonfiction, we learn about the cheerleaders, in the Civil Rights era, from all-white high school with a big red C for “central” on their chest waved and cheered “Two, four, six, eight – We don’t want to integrate.” (as cited in Chin, 2002, 1094), we know more evidences of this offensive attitude in many other fictional works including Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor. From the beginning to the end of the story, the writer reveals her light irony when describing Julian’s mother and other passengers and their hostile attitudes toward the Negro people in general and the Negro passengers on the bus. Julian’s mother was so afraid to ride the buses alo...
