COURSE :Introduction To Literature

DEPARTMENT : ENGLISH

PROFESSOR : OLMSTED

Lecture1 : Character

View the Power Point Presentation of the Lecture

Hi today’s presentation will be about the 5 methods of character presentation. We’ll use Alice Walker’s Everyday Use and in particular Dee as an example. First authorial interpretation this is infrequent in modern fiction. In older stories it was much more common for an author to actually speak to the reader and to interrupt events. You might have the author saying dear reader can you believe that this would happen and to talk to us about what things mean. In Everyday Use Walker stays out of the picture completely at least as a commentator and the narrator Dee and Maggie’s mother offers one of the ways that we have of understanding Dee that is the narrator’s interpretation. An important and familiar method of showing character is having the narrator comment and react to others in the story and of course that’s exactly what happens in Everyday Use instead of authorial interpretation the mother is the source of much of our understanding of the two daughters. For instance, it’s not coming up I have a passage in which the mother says I used to think she hated Maggie too but that was before we raised the money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice. She washed in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away at that just the moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand. We learn a lot about Dee in this, we learn a lot about the mother and Maggie, the level of education they have but mostly in this paragraph we learn Dee. We learn that she reads without pity now this is the mother’s interpretation but I think we can rely on her I think this is a reliable narrator partly because we get to confirm what the narrator says by getting to see Dee in action. She burned us with a lot of knowledge this actually is you know becomes interesting since there is a fire in this story. Pressed us to her and then shoved us away so we get a lot of information in the author’s excuse me the narrator’s description of Dee and Dee’s attitudes the fact that she’s arrogant and impatient and really it looks to me in this passage with not with very much love for her mother or her sister. The third way is through appearance this could include dress, a person’s body, a non-verbal mannerisms. This is a really important method in this story because we learn a great deal about Dee based on how she looks and acts although we see her only through her mother’s eye as long as we believe that the mother is reliable she’s not crazy, she’s not a pathological liar then we can pretty much rely on the description. Pay attention in this passage to Walker’s emphasis on eyes and seeing. Notice that when Dee first arrives the mother says that it is hard to see them clearly through the strong sun and at the end of the story there’s an image of Dee with her face almost completely hidden by sunglasses and I wouldn’t consider that a symbol for this story and you might look at that and see what you think. Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun…I hear Maggie go “hunnnh” again. It is her sister’s hair. It stands straight up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals, and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. Lots of wonderful and important information is included in this passage as well. We understand from this and begin to get a glimpse of the ground that Dee is dressed in a traditional African kind of costume that made a kind of appearance in the United States probably well you still see this a lot but it’s a way of going back and reclaiming or recognizing a connection with African roots. The question that comes out of this story is what the quality of this connection with African roots with Maggie. How sincere is it? How deep is the meaning of it? We find out that the fact that Dee’s hair is not tamed, hasn’t been straightened may be a bit of an Afro here but this a little bit shocking to both about Maggie and the mother and she’s got two long pigtails you can picture that too. What’s interesting to me in terms of mannerisms is what we find out here in the end is before she’s even had a chance to give anyone a hug or anything she is back getting that Polaroid getting that camera and she’s taking pictures, she’s making the house I’m sure the house is included we find out more a little bit about why and we get this key passage about Maggie who is cowering. So Maggie is obviously painted here as the shy one, the timid one Dee as the aggressive one the one who kind of violates other people’s space. The next method of character presentation is speech and dialogue. This is a direct method of character development through speech we see and hear for ourselves what a character is made of we don’t need to have the author or the narrator tell us how to interpret because we can do it for ourselves. Obviously dialogue is different from conversation and a writer would bore us to tears if she told us everything that has to be said in a conversation. What we get in dialogue is what’s important so it’s always good to look for clues in what characters say to each other. For example, “Well, I say, “Dee.” “No, Mama,” she says. “Not ‘Dee,’ Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!” “What happened to ‘Dee’?” I wanted to know. “She’s dead,” Wangero said. “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me.” “You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie or Dicie I’m not sure,” I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her “Big Dee” after Dee was born. “But who was she named after?” “I guess after Grandma Dee.” “And who was she named after?” asked Wangero. “Her mother,” I said, and saw Wangero was getting tired. “That’s about as far back as I can trace it,” I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the branches. “Well,” said Asalamalakim, “there you are.” “Uhnnnh,” I heard Maggie say. This is a wonderful passage where we learned so much about the conversation again we hear Maggie’s characteristic grunt which I think there’s only one place in this story where she actually says something towards the end. We get again the argument we get to see Wangero’s impatience. We get to see the mother’s reaction to that impatience even though she could go on and trace their roots back through the Civil War she doesn’t. She is responding to Dee’s impatience and she stops and says just gives well that’s about as far as I can trace it. We also get introduced to the conflict in the story between Dee’s understanding of heritage and the grandmother and Maggie’s understanding of heritage which if I understand it is key to the theme of this story. The last manner of presentation is called thought. Since the territory of a character’s mind is likely to be the center of action thought is very important. In a story like Barn Burning you’ll find that the main character’s thoughts are told through a non-participant narrator. In Everyday Use we learn about Dee even when the narrator mother is talking about herself. Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program…Then we are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands…One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill by nightfall. But of course all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake and this is we are introduced into the mind of this wonderful mother one of her fantasies and I’m going to make a stab at it and say that this is the kind of fantasy that lots of people have. Maybe not this one in particular but that idea of 15 minutes 15 seconds of fame or some kind of dramatic reconciliation and the idea of tears in Dee’s eyes again look at this story think of eyes and seeing as an important symbol in this story. The fact that the only time that Dee has tears in her eyes in this story is when the mother imagines that she has tears her eyes tells us a lot about Dee of course we get this terrific description of the mother, her hard work, her strength, and again her recognition that who she is in reality is a failure according to what the daughter would have her be which is slim and trim meeting all the demands of what the society says women should look like. She wants her skin lighter, less African American which is ironic I think since she seems to be claiming her African roots. So you know you might look at this as kind of an interesting passage. Alright, that is it. Oh. Close. Alright that’s it, I’m back but it’s time to go. See you next time.