How Many Definitions Can One Word Have?

When I chose the topic of growth for my project, I had a clear objective.  I wanted to find out if growth could be defined as change in both a positive and a negative direction.  Even just with creating interview questions, I realized how giant my topic was.  There were so many directions I could choose to go in: negative vs. positive, natural vs. forced, personal vs. religious...In the end, I think I dove into each argument at least a little bit.

Nothing that I discovered throughout the project really shocked me.  I did come across many views that I disagreed with.  One belief I saw many times (by both professional writers and my friends) is that it takes effort to grow.  While I definitely agree that effort is a huge force in growth, I don't believe it's necessary. I have trouble believing that someone can go through four years of high school (or any part of life, really) without growing.  I also heard that religion is necessary for growth. In the same sense, I completely disagree with that point.  While religion can definitely shape growth in many ways, it can't be necessary.

Overall, I really enjoyed this project.  I'm usually not one for poetry and art, so I was shocked to find myself having fun browsing poems and the DIA.  My favorite part, though, was reading Skippy Dies.  At 660 pages, it was a difficult task.  But now that I've finished it, I find myself missing the characters.  The novel rotated points of view between many characters.  While I find myself missing some more than others, I connected with all of them.

Even though this project seemed incredibly daunting in the beginning (and the middle), I feel it was a great experience to discover and explore all the connotations of a single word.  It was certainly much better than a final exam. :)

On the Changes of the Characters (Or lack thereof)

The Poisonwood Bible was unlike any book I've ever read.  Even from the way it starts and ends - an unknown narrator using the second person in such a strange way - it was a new experience.  While I've read books told from multiple perspectives, this one was unique.  Each character has a very unique voice.  As each character developed, so did her voice (well, except for Rachel, whom I found to be a very static character).  For the first half of the novel, I was drawn to Adah.  She sees things in such a different way than her sisters.  I loved her palindromes and backwards phrases.  Seeing life from the perspective of someone who just sits and observes is interesting.  However, when the story began to progress much more quickly, after the family left their village, I became more attached to Leah.  It seemed that Kingsolver abandoned Adah in America, not paying particular attention to her.  Being someone who always follows exactly how writers want me to, I abandoned Adah in favor of Leah as well.  It was very strange, and seemed backwards: as the book progressed, Adah became more independent, and ended up no longer behind Leah.  As she grew, though, Kingsolver and I drew away from her, abandoning her in a completely different way.
Rachel was an incredibly amusing character.  Her use of the words irregardless and anomalous, as well as her description of Christian marriage as "monotonous" cracked me up.  Her story, though, was quite boring.  My favorite thing about Leah, Adah, and Ruth May was their interaction with the Congolese people, with whom Rachel would have nothing to do.  Even when she lived in South Africa, she was the same.  Her love for her restaurant, and nothing else, annoyed me.  As I mentioned earlier, her writing style didn't change at all.  Even when she turned 50, she used the phrase "Jeez oh man," which she used countless times as a teenager.
After finishing the book, I find myself disliking Rachel, and feeling no connections to Orleanna or Ruth May.  If I had to order the characters by preference, I'd put Leah and Adah at a tie, which I believes works well with how their lives turned out.

Two Sides of a Coin

A Thousand Acres is by far my favorite book we've read in Lit.  I loved the writing style, and the characters.  Or, as Hannah put it, I hated the characters, but still loved them.  They all seemed so innocent in the beginning, but it eventually became clear that this wasn't the case.  Because we saw everything through Ginny's eyes, it took a while to see the bad in some characters.  I wonder how different it would be if we had seen everything through Rose's eyes.  My guess? A lot different.
Which makes me wonder why Smiley chose to write from Ginny's perspective.  In King Lear, Goneril really didn't have much of a role.  Sure, she had some important parts, but she was definitely not the main character by any means.  Shakespeare showed Goneril and Regan as pretty much carbon copies of each other; they were the evil sisters.  Not much more to them.  When you just read A Thousand Acres, your first thought is something along the lines of "What? They're totally different! Rose is the evil sister, and Ginny's innocent! Rose abused Ginny!" Well, some of you might not have thought that.  You might have just skipped to my next point.  If you did, kudos.  If you take the time to try and view A Thousand Acres from the third point of view, things look a little different.  As readers within Ginny's head, we were charmed by Jess right with her.  Who cares if she was married?  Her marriage was falling apart!  And Jess is hot!  And Rose just went and stole him from Ginny! She deserved to be poisoned!
Woah.  Slow down.  Ginny cheated on Ty, who really wasn't such a bad guy.  And, yeah, Rose "stole" Jess from her, it shouldn't matter, because Ginny was married!  Even if you say it did matter, does that really condone Ginny poisoning her sister?  What it all comes down to is that Ginny really isn't so innocent.  Maybe she and Rose are a lot alike.  After all, they are sisters and best friends who have lived right next to each other their whole lives.
That all being said, I loved this book.  A whole lot.  The character dynamics are great, and it's a fabulous way to tell a Shakespeare play in a modern setting.

Who knew a book about a family on a farm could be so interesting?

That's a Burden

I wanted to name this post "You Can Tell a Lot about a Woman by the Contents of Her Purse (and Who Carries It), but Sometimes It's More than It Appears to Be," but that's just obnoxiously long. So I went with the current over-used phrase. Because when most people see a man carrying his wife's purse, they make assumptions - she's spoiled and doesn't want to carry it, it's too heavy for her, he secretly enjoys carrying purses... - and they may be right.  Or they could be missing some blatant symbolism (not to mention manners).  You see, when a husband carries his wife's purse, he's helping carry some of her burden.  And what "In the End, We Are All Light" is saying is that carrying someone's burden is a sign of your love; you carry theirs and they forgive you for giving them yours.  And when this happens, the burdens don't seem so bad anymore.
This all ties in well with Their Eyes Were Watching God.  In her first two marriages, Janie's been burdened with the so-called womanly role.  She's been made to run the store and make dinner (without burning it!).  Just don't ask her to carry wood, or she might just leave you.  Even when Joe dies, she still has to run the store (while pretending to mourn).  But then the young, dashing Tea Cake comes along and makes her life so much happier.  He helps her decide to sell the store and move away, taking that burden off her.  And of course, he doesn't make her keep up the required role of a woman - he even lets her take her hair down.  Tea Cake frees Janie from having to live as a dependent woman, when she truly is very independent.  And this all is easy for him: freeing her doesn't put a huge weight on his shoulders.
Of course, their marriage isn't without Janie carrying some of Tea Cake's burdens.  Tea Cake is poor and Janie is rich; thus, Janie supports both of them.  Even when Tea Cake spends all of Janie's money without asking her, she forgives him.  When Tea Cake gets rabies, Janie takes on the burden of killing him to save both him and herself.  And here's the true sign of her love: she still loves Tea Cake and cherishes his memory, but is able to move on with her life, until that last burden is "light as a feather blown."

AP Feminist Bird Watching

Saline High School doesn't have a class specifically focused on feminism.  If you wanted to take one, though, AP Lit would be a good place to start.  In two weeks, we read The Awakening and A Doll's House, and we watched The Hours.  The three of them have a pretty common theme - women leaving their lives as they know it to find out who they really are.  In A Doll's House and The Hours, Nora and Laura abandon their families and start a new life.  In The Awakening and The Hours, Edna and Virginia Woolf take it a step farther; they kill themselves.  And the weird thing?  They both drown.  Edna comes right out and says that she's never felt freer than while she's in the water.  Even though it's never explained, it can probably be assumed that Virginia pretty much feels the same way.
The only woman who doesn't leave her family is Clarissa.  Of course, this because the person who was oppressing her has left her.  Clarissa had spent much of her life taking care of Richard, who was suffering from AIDS.  It's clear that both her partner and her daughter are feeling neglected (especially after Clarissa tells her daughter she's only living when she's with Richard).  Only when he kills himself is she free from him.
As if there weren't enough bird motifs in The Awakening and A Doll's House, there are even more in The Hours.  Virginia Woolf is finally taking a break from writing a book when her sister visits.  On a walk with her niece, she finds a dying bird.  They try to save the bird, but, in great foreshadowing, can't.  The two of them  are both heartbroken, but for different reasons.  Virginia's niece is very young, and the sight of the bird tears her up so much she makes a funeral for it.  But Virginia sees more than just a dying bird - she sees her heroine, and possibly even herself.  While writing this book, living in Richmond, she herself has been withering away.  She knew it, but it didn't really hit her until she saw the bird. She then tells her sister and niece that she had been planning on killing off her heroine, but has changed her mind (very likely due to the bird, in part).  She also convinces her husband that they need to move back to London in order for her to survive.  Alas, even that isn't enough to save Virginia, and she ends up dying as well.

Tales of Birds and Epiphanies

The Awakening and A Doll's House are indeed very similar.  Each has a wife and mother who is learning about herself and breaking away from what society tells her to do and be.  Edna and Nora are practically the same person - I still keep getting them confused.  Both women have husbands who are controlling and concerned with their roles in society.  In the end, the wives successfully get away from their husbands and are free from the life they had.
Of course, there are differences in the books - the most obvious being the way they escape.  Nora has an epiphany and walks out of her house.  Edna, on the other hand, escapes by committing suicide.  Though some people may say that suicide is the cheater's way out, I disagree.  In her eyes, she had no other options.  Her reputation had been ruined, and she had nowhere to go.  Another difference is the relationships Nora and Edna formed while away from their husbands.  Nora began to lean on Dr. Rank, seriously considering getting money from him.  She clearly did not love him; she just wanted his money.  It can be argued, though, that Edna loved Robert.  She had a relationship with him very unlike the one with her husband, and was experiencing a new sense of freedom with it.
Both books dealt with bird symbolism and freedom.  Nora's husband frequently called her his little "skylark," and Edna actually moved into a pigeon house.  Symbolism doesn't get much more obvious than that, folks.  But the meaning of the bird motifs differ: For Nora, she was her husband's skylark, while she was constrained in that marriage.  Edna's moving into the pigeon house was her big step towards freedom.  She had moved out of her husband's house into her own.
Overall, The Awakening and A Doll's House are very easy to compare, and even easier to confuse (especially when you've just watched Gone with the Wind.)  They're great stories about feminism that intertwine amazingly.

A Book's Always Better the Second Time Around (I Hope)

Middlesex was a strange book for me, in that I was bored by the first half but absolutely loved the second half.  I didn't care much about Desdemona and Lefty (in fact, I got really sick of Desdemona), but enjoyed their story.  It was around Milton and Tessie's story that I got antsy for Callie to be born.  Once she was, and when she got to her relationship with The Object was when I started really enjoying the book.  It was really interesting seeing the world from Callie's point of view, from her self-consciousness in that what she was feeling was wrong, through when she had her transformation.
When we discussed the book in class though, being assigned to book 1 gave me a better appreciation for the first half of the book.  I hadn't noticed how much went into it, and how much symbolism there was there.  All the connections between Desdemona's life and Cal's life amaze me.  I really admire authors that are able to put that much work and connections into their writing.  Now that we've discussed it, I want to reread it, though I can't right now because I'm busy preparing for Deathly Hallows by rereading the entire Harry Potter series :)