Similarities in the Works of Atwood and Wilson

Upon first consideration, the works of Margaret Atwood and August Wilson may not appear to share much in common. Beyond the distinction in genres, Atwood’s works are often dominated by the exploration of sexism while Wilson’s works seem suffused with the examination of racism. Through social commentary, both authors are exploring the influence, past, and, in the case of Atwood, possible future outcomes of their respective motivating social force. Themes and motifs in Wilson’s plays Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Gem of the Ocean and Atwood’s Surfacing, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Door, and The Tent are not, however, exclusive to the individual author. Among other shared themes, Wilson’s works also scrutinize the role of women in society, while Atwood’s works recognize, to a lesser extent, the affect of racism on societal tension. This sharing of themes and motifs make the authors an excellent pairing for comparison in a journal article or literature course.

Atwood often takes her societal portrayals to the extreme due to the dystopian and worst case scenario nature of her plots. Wilson’s societal portrayals are much more realistic, constrained as he is by placing his plays in a specific past time period. Atwood nearly bridges this gap with the realistic setting of Surfacing, however the gloomy, often cynical, plot and ambiguous ending can overshadow any similarity the text shares with Wilson’s period plays. The tone and mood of Surfacing forces the reader to draw more connections with The Handmaid’s Tale and her flash fiction pieces like “Winter’s Tale” and “Salome was a Dancer” and her poem “Your Children Cut Their Hands…” than with Wilson’s heart wrenching but cautiously optimistic plays. The works do share themes, however, like the necessary struggle to overcome adversity, the affect of unbalanced and stereotypical gender roles on society, the cause(s) and outcome(s) of alienating an individual or group from society, and using the spiritual, supernatural, or metaphysical to prompt character transformation.

A similar quality in both authors’ works is a demoralized or overtly struggling main character, often surrounded by struggling secondary characters as well. In most of the texts, the characters’ struggles are the obvious affect of their place and role in society. In The Handmaid’s Tale, a radical example of societal restrictions due to totalitarian rule, Offred struggles for a voice, independence, basic rights, the “freedom to” rather than the “freedom from” (24). Because she is a woman, she is offered the role of six possible positions: Aunt, Wife, Econowife, Martha, Handmaid, or Unwoman Colonist. Her choice, however, is severely limited by the Puritan-like belief system. Because she married a man who had previously been divorced and because she could bear children, all of her options were reduced to Handmaid or Colonist, which really isn’t much of a choice if she at all valued her life and future (10, 224). As Rosemary Sullivan notes in her article “What If? Writing The Handmaid’s Tale”—which explores probable personal and societal influences that lead to Atwood’s creation of the dystopia—the female roles defined by the ability to have children, or lack thereof, stemmed from the fears of approaching mass infertility during the 1980s (850). Any infertile society that valued children would naturally reduce women’s rights, opportunities, and freedoms to find a viable solution.

The narrator of Surfacing has more economic means available than the characters in other works do, since her parents could afford to buy an isolated cabin and send her to college, and seems less trapped by her position in society (30, 49). She is held back throughout most of the novel, however, by her fragmented existence—her inability to acknowledge her past abortion and its repercussions to her life—and her, as of yet, unfound power. Her past lover, the father of her aborted child, is also able to manipulate her view of gender roles in their society. He is able to convince her that women are unimportant, particularly in the fields of Art and Art History, latter affecting her choice of jobs and leaving her an unhappy illustrator and commercial artist: “For a while I was going to be a real artist; he thought that was cute but misguided, he said I should study something I’d be able to use because there has never been any important women artists…but he was right, there never have been any” (49). As Carol P. Christ contends in “Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women‘s Spiritual Quest and Vision,” it is not until she reclaims the power of her female biological role, in the act of conceiving a child, that the narrator is fully able to acknowledge her “psychic suicide” during the first part of the novel and begin the process of reversing her gender-imposed alienation from society (330).

The Door and The Tent also deal with societal alienation through the main characters and speaker, though in much smaller doses. The most memorable societal struggle in The Door is the disenfranchised poet lamenting, at times, both the normalizing success of poets and their occasional dismissal. In “Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later,” the speaker acknowledges that poets have been tolerated, celebrated, but mostly ignored, “by this crowd that has finally admitted / to itself it doesn’t give / much of a fart for art, / and would rather see a good evisceration / any day” (Door 30). Paradoxically, shortly after the speaker complains about the tastes of audience, the speaker complains that the worst is becoming respectable, anthologized, taught in schools, “with cleaned-up biographies and skewed photos” (33). The speaker is not happy with the condition of the poet in either situation, marginalized or normalized by society. The Tent has many such examples of characters being alienated by their society, like the narrator of “Voice.” The flash fiction piece necessitates a focus on the narrator and little mention of the society she is being alienated from, but still readers can infer values exhibited by the society: an appreciation of beauty, a preference for specialization, a marginalizing of the person in preference for what he or she can do: “Soon I was sought after, or rather my voice was. We went everywhere together…My voice was courted. Bouquets were thrown to it. Money was bestowed on it. Men fell on their knees before it“ (Tent 21-22).

In all three of Wilson’s plays, the main characters negotiate the stress of being considered and treated like second class citizens because of their race and past roots in slavery, financial and career limitations, and isolation from the dominant society. Troy does manage to overcome the odds of his position in society somewhat in Fences, becoming “the first colored driver” in the rubbish business (45). Still, arguing over financial issues pushed him to seek an extramarital affair: “She gives me a different idea . . .a different understanding about myself. I can step out of this house and get away from the pressures and problems . . .be a different man. I ain’t got to wonder how I’m gonna pay the bills or get the roof fixed” (68-69). Race and financial issues motivate the strife between brother and sister in The Piano Lesson. The existence of the highly desired piano is owed to slavery, the division of families, and depriving human beings of their rights. Both siblings view using the piano differently as a way to honor their ancestors and Boy Charles: Boy Willie wants to sell the piano to the buy land his family worked as slaves, while Berniece seeks to honor their deceased by keeping the piano as a symbol of their roots and, perhaps, as a cautionary tale (50-52). Gem of the Ocean examines the continually changing societal values of the black community, specifically the demise and loss of its spiritual center, which is represented by Aunt Ester. As Richard Noggle observes in “‘…if you live long enough the boat / will turn around’ The Birth and Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson,” the “ultimate failure of community in Wilson’s world is more often due to failings within the community itself: an inability to come together, to discover power from within, to respect life” (64). This is demonstrated by Caesar turning his back on the black community in the pursuit of money and the “white policing” power.



Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Door. New York: Random House, 2009.

---.The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Random House, 1998.

---. Surfacing. New York: Random House, 1998.

---. The Tent. New York: Random House, 2007.

Christ, Carol P. “Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest and
Vision.” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2.2 (1976): 316-330.

Noggle, Richard. "‘…if you live long enough the boat will turn around’: The Birth and
Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson." College Literature 36.2 (2009): 58-73.

Sullivan, Rosemary. “What If? Writing The Handmaid’s Tale.” University of Toronto
Quarterly 75.3 (2006): 850-856.

Wilson, August. Fences. New York: Penguin, 2009.

---. Gem of the Ocean. New York: Penguin 2006.

---. The Piano Lesson. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Dog Food No-nos

Pork
Grapes/raisins
Onion
Chocolate (the higher the coco level, the worse for your dog)
Coffee/coffee grounds/tea
Fried foods
Pure animal fat
Bones (particularly chicken)
Animal skin
Tomatoes
Avocado
Apple seeds
Raw eggs (salmonella poisoning)
Salt
Dairy products

Rose

Many images and motifs repeat throughout Li-Young Lee’s Rose. Some of the frequent motifs are of flowers (roses, chrysanthemums, irises, lilies, daisies), hair, hearts, hands, sleep, kisses, fruit (apples, persimmons, peaches, pears), memory, and family. I decided to focus on the motif of hair because some of the imagery was slightly disturbing to me. The almost obsessive detail and devotion to describing hair begins with the poem “Dreaming of Hair” and continues throughout the three sections of the book. The speaker’s attention to hair is first witnessed when he contemplates his lover’s hair in “Dreaming of Hair,” before the poem switches gears and describes hair as having the power in dreams to tangle the brain as it “ties the tongue dumb” (22). In the following stanza, hair is tamed to describe familial situations: the speaker watching his mother twine her hair and the speaker pushing back the brother’s hair to “stroke his brow” in an almost motherly fashion (23). Finally, hair is tied together in the contrasting images of death, life, and healing: “Out of the grave / my father’s hair / bursts. A strand / pierces my left sole, shoots / up bone, past ribs, / to the broken heart it stitches” (23) and later “Sometimes I recall that our hair grows after death” (24).

The undertone that time spent bonding over hair strengthens family ties is also addressed in “Early in the Morning.” Fixing hair becomes a social occasion for the father, and presumably the speaker, to take in the sight, sound, and feel of one of life’s normally mundane activities: “mother glides an ivory comb / through her hair, heavy / and black as calligrapher’s ink,” “father watches, listens for / the music of comb / against hair,” and “because of the way / my mother’s hair falls / when he pulls the pins out” (25). Hair indicating family heritage is mentioned in part three of “Always a Rose,” when the speaker acknowledges that his face is his mother’s and “hair is also hers” (39). This type of tender family imagery continues in “Braiding,” where much of the poem is dedicated to describing the braiding of a loved one’s hair in a time honored fashion: “My father / did this for my mother, / just as I do for you” and “So I braid / your hair each day. My fingers gather, measure hair, / hook, pull and twist hair and hair” (57-58).

The imagery of hair growth being connected to death makes a reappearance in “Rain Diary.” After questioning where his dead are, the speaker comments that “By now, my father’s hair / has grown past his shoulders,” linking back to the original observation that hair continues to grow after death, blurring the line between life and death (60). The images of hair transpose death through the juxtaposition of family and graveyard scenes dealing with, or describing, hair throughout the book, sometimes within the same poem as in the case of “Dreaming of Hair.”

Given Sugar, Given Salt

A repeating theme in Given Sugar, Given Salt is the idea of sleep being a type of death and rebirth. In the “Dream Notebook,” Hirshfield introduces us to the concept that we experience different lives during dreams: “What will become of these / my many lives, / abandoned each morning abruptly to their own fates?” (18). The scribblings she wrote during the night to capture her thoughts and ideas she feels are someone else’s. The writings, like her memories, she cannot attribute to herself, only “to a woman who / looks faintly like me and whom I wish well” (18).

This concept of forgetting your identity or experiencing a rebirth after sleep is revealed again in “Moment.” The speaker claims that everyone has had the experience of amnesia after sleep, “not knowing for a time / who she is, who he is” (59). People react differently, panicking or sighing with pleasure, no doubt depending on the circumstances of their actual life. Everyone, however, “envies the other, / who must so love their lives” (59).

Sleep is also tied to death in “Pillow.” After visiting with a dying friend, the speaker returns home to sleep well, “without dismay or turning, / though he would continue dying, though I would live” (41). She credits this to what she puts under her pillow that night because she “could not eat them” (40). What this is, I’m not sure, it could be the “words like river pebbles” from the stanza before. In the second to last stanza she creates a simile between the releasing of hands with her friend to go about their separate tasks—perhaps living and dying—and a person “arranging the blankets and pillow / just so before sleeping, / setting the one day in order to enter the next” (41).

The poem “Sleep” doesn’t just describe the feelings upon waking like “Dream Notebook” and “Moment,” though it does reiterate the occasions of buoyant awakenings and the occasional inexplicable grief-filled awakenings similar to those in “Moments” (80). Sleep is personified in the poem as the speaker tries to talk to their sleep, “ask it politely for this or that, / but it only averts its gaze” (79). Sleep then talks, saying “Go away” and “Leave me along” and the author recognizes who is master and who is slave because she lavishes it with comfortable bedding, milk or wine (79). The speaker then clarifies that sleep actively enters us, we don’t enter seep, and that it tills and waters in a simile that compares sleep to a farmer (79-80). Sleep is finally portrayed as inescapable. The child in the poem refuses sleeps, begs for more time, but the speaker notes that the child too will succumb to sleep and join all those “who, drifting, / distal, quilt the drowsy night-song of the mortal” (80).

The Curator of Silence

In The Curator of Silence, Jude Nutter increasingly explores mortality throughout the book. Many of the poems use death as an underlying theme or use allusions to mortality in the titles. The poem “The Rest of Us” contests the existence of heaven and what follows after: “There is no heaven; / only birds and wind. Your mind / flirting with its own absence” (17). This declaration contrasts with the images in the stanza before it, where the speaker cannot help but think about “Blake, who saw angels / bleating with fire in the trees,” which indicates that perhaps mortality is experiential (17). The last stanza in the poem makes the concession that there are two worlds, one with angels and one “where the rest of us live, where there are no angels” (18).

Death is personified in “Crow,” described as “everyone’s lover; the ultimate / philanderer,” who will “follow each of us like a voyeur after dark in a small town” (54). Death disguises itself so that the unwitting will turn to it seeking solace, its voice “spliced through [the] mother’s whispers” (54). The following stanza incorporates the motifs of emptiness and absence echoed in other poems. In “Crows,” birds “stand fussing / in a circle around their dead companion” and stare after his body long after it disappears out to sea (67). The last line ties together threads that have been carried throughout the book concerning the world of the speaker (and the book) and the imagined world. The speaker’s world, the world we presumably live in, is at times, “just enough like paradise” (67). In the world of the poem, death begets emptiness and absence, an end, but the beauty of the moment makes the world tolerable, enough like the world with a heaven and an afterlife that the speaker finds comfort.

Nutter uses multiple references to Biblical tales and a few allusions to Greek myths. Adam and Eve, and original sin, are hinted at in “Grave Robbing with Rilke”: “Any fall toward knowledge is won / through disobedience to the gods” (7). Eden is mentioned as an alternate place, “our most elaborate dream” in “Horses,” likening it to that other world of angels and afterlife (21). “Look” and “The Last Supper” deal directly with the characters of God, Mary, and Gabriel, at times despoiling their religious reputations and infallibility: “Even God is a victim of vanity” and “here’s Gabriel / in the side chapel in his oversized cloak—no glimmer / of spandex anywhere and it’s a miracle” (28). The Greek chimera, an animal composed of multiple animals, is used in a metaphor in the title poem. Crows are also featured in both Greek and European mythology. In Greek myth, Crows are associated with rumors and telling secrets (Coronis turned the raven from white to black when it told Apollo about his love affair). More famously, crows are recognized as the harbingers of death in European mythology (because of their color and circling of dead bodies), which is the reputation I believe Nutter is playing on in “Crow” and “Crows.”

Bellocq's Ophelia

Bellocq’s Ophelia is an example of ekphrasis, poetry inspired by art. Trethewey weaves her narrative around several photos from E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits. I linked the last poem in the book “Vignette” to the cover art, though several others appear to make direct reference to over individual photographs from Storyville: “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” “Photograph of a Bawd Drinking Raleigh Rye,” “Blue Book,” “Portrait #1,” “Portrait #2.” These poems make direct reference to photographs from the 1911-1912s, though only “Bellocq’s Ophelia” and “Vignette,” the poems that open and end the book, note that they are “from a photograph by E.J. Bellocq, circa 1912” (3, 47). Descriptive lines from the non-attributed poems like “Portrait #2”—“I pose nude for this photograph, awkward / one arm folded behind my back, the other limp at my side”—are similar enough to lines in “Vignette”—“She wears / white, a rhinestone choker, fur, / her dark crown of hair”—that I inferred that the author had used a real photo of Bellocq’s as inspiration (42, 47). Trethewey blends her narrative so well that it is difficult to separate the poems describing an actual picture from those describing images that might be the of author’s invention.

It is difficult to distinguish what is based in historical fact and what is the author’s imagination because she creates a narrative for the photos but intertwines historical references. In “March 1911” the speaker makes an allusion to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (March 25, 1911): “In the paper today, tragedy / in New York City – a clothing factory, so many women / dying in a fire. The place they worked, locked up tight, became a tomb” and “I read that some chose a last moment of flight, / leaping nine stories to their deaths. Other stayed / inside, perhaps to burn clean in the fire’s embrace” (22). The speaker could have mentioned the name of the factory and cemented the disaster as a historical reference for the reader, but chose to be somewhat obscure—the majority of readers would probably recognize and be able to put a name to the incident. Other historically correct objects are mentioned in passing, like the Kodak camera and book American Highways and Byways. These references to time and culture-appropriate situations and objects make the poems read more like nonfiction.

I noticed a tendency on the part of the poet to cover up other important information like the name of the factory fire. Certain names in the poem are withheld from the reader: “Miss J—” (8), “Countess P—” (11). I’m not sure why the poet conceals the identity of certain persons, unless it is to provide a sense of realistic concern that revealing those people would lead to their arrest for indecent behavior. The mixture of forthright details and concealed information works because of the overall method of disclosing facts and story through a private letter format. Presumably the details the person (Constance) receiving the letter needs to know, she is already familiar with (names, places, situations). Because the reader is looking in from the outside of the conversation, he/she is necessarily less familiar with the allusions and hidden identities.

The Complete Book of Kong

I’m afraid I don’t know exactly how to interpret Trowbridge’s The Complete Book of Kong. I’ve never come across a poetry book like this, so I have nothing to compare it to. Basing a series of poems on a movie and twentieth century culture is everything the Modernists abhorred. In this way, I am able to classify the work as contemporary, but it is still difficult for me to get beneath the humor and poetic wit to explore the shared human experience and observations about twentieth century culture represented within the poems.

Fay, a repeating character in the poems and Kong’s co-star, plays the role of Kong’s unrequited love interest. She is not always portrayed in positive way: “And if it weren’t for love, I’d drop / the shrieking little bimbo sixty stories (18); “Fay’s kapok’s going bad, settling / in low spots from cheek to thigh, / wrinkling her hide, sinking her eyes, / changing her prance to a vague step taking” and “She won’t scream anymore” (56). Her reappearance throughout the poems and his observations of Fay going off with Bruce Cabot, however, gives the audience some indication of how important Fay is to Kong and his suffering at her screaming reactions and dismissal of him as a creature of importance or notice. Fay’s dismissal is another rejection of Kong by society.

The length to which Kong goes to explore the culture surrounding him represents a fundamental need for humans to fit in, to find a niche within their world. Kong tries out for the Bears (18), tries baseball (22), goes on Let’s Make a Deal (26), attends experimental art films (34), joins a carnival (35), tries a dating service (38-39), meets the pope (42), and has a crush on Madonna (48). Kong displays a complex personality and encounters many interests, dislikes, and failures during the telling of his Hollywood story. Despite his longing to be included in society, Kong is a perpetual outsider, restricted by his appearance and his lack of understanding of the culture surrounding him. In “Kong Answers the Call for a Few Good Men,” Kong misunderstands the idioms of the language and then regurgitates a similarly mangled sentiment: “He said if we girls thought we were men, / we had another think coming. I wished / to save my think for later, when everyone was free to smoke them if he had them” (27). Kong bears his wish to belong most openly in “Kong Picks Door Number Two”: “Am I human now?” I asked, feeling bare and somewhat smaller” (26).

Trowbridge uses Kong, the perpetual outsider, as a figure to entertain and inform. Beneath the blinding humor and wit are Trowbridge’s observations on twentieth century culture and the human condition. This deepens the automatic assessment that the book is merely for entertainment, that it is actually an intended work of literature.