Identity and Margaret Atwoods Lady Oracle :: essays papers

Personality and Margaret Atwoods Lady Oracle The connections we have with various individuals for the duration of our lives are solid impacts on all of us. Our associations with each other can characterize what our identity is, just as the nature of the lives we lead. Difficult connections cause pressure and despondency, while close, adoring connections are a wellspring of help and solace. Joan Foster, the principle character in Margaret Atwood=s Lady Oracle, is a mind boggling lady who has had too much of fierce connections during her life. From her adolescence and high school relationship with her mom, to her bond with her significant other sometime down the road, Joan=s connections are infrequently liberated from unrest and show. These connections certainly have an effect on Joan, affecting her as an individual. The issue of Joan and her connections uncovers an inquiry: How are Joan=s connections critical to her personality? The main significant relationship in Joan=s life is the one with her mom. Joan feels undesirable and disliked by her mom, who treats Joan icily as a result of her weight issue. From the outset, Joan battles to fit in with her mother=s ideal vision of her and attempts to satisfy her mother=s desires. At the point when she comes up short at this, Joan loathes her mother=s unendurable mentality and gets opposing toward her. Joan=s personality at that point gets dependent on something contrary to what her mom expects and needs from her. As of now my mom gave me an apparel remittance, as a motivating force to lessen. She figured I should purchase garments that would make me less obvious, the dull dresses with little polka-specks and vertical stripes supported by originators for the fat. Rather I searched out garments of a curious and hostile terribleness, brutally hued, on a level plane striped. Some of them I got in maternity shops, others at cut-rate rebate stores; I was particularly satisfied with a red felt skirt, cut around with a dark phone appliqued onto it. The more brilliant the hues, the more portly the impact, the more certain I was to purchase. I wasn=t going to leave myself alone reduced, kills, by a naval force blue spotted sack (Atwood 84). Joan made a special effort to purchase garments that she realized her mom would detest, and that become piece of what her identity was.

Octavian by M.T. Anderson Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Octavian by M.T. Anderson - Essay Example Anderson. The book recounts to the tale of Octavian, a kid of African-American legacy who lives with his mom at The Novanglian College of Lucidity. He is raised among researchers and thinkers and is given lavish treatment for an amazing duration. In the main volume, we find out about the training of Octavian; he is capable in music and strict examinations, and music contemplates have made him a capable musician. At first Octavian was under the impression, or it may be the case that he had the deception, that every one of the individuals living at â€Å"The Novanglian College of Lucidity† is equivalent. In any case, because of a misstep submitted by his mom, them two are tossed out of the school and need to live with Richard Sharpe. Octavian accepted that he was a free individual from the Utopian culture yet his fantasies are broken by Sharpe’s plan to investigate him to demonstrate that the African race is second rate compared to white and different races. In this manne r Octavian comes to discover the truth of living in the old America.

The Least and Most Feminist Thing

The Least and Most Feminist Thing Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their essay collection  Psychopomps  (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel  All City  (Seven Stories Press) are forthcoming in Spring of 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University.  @DiFantastico If you asked me when I was 24, I was not a feminist. That was the year that I traveled to Montana over my summer break to stay with my best friend and her newborn baby, the summer I worked in heavy manual labor, the summer I first read The Second Sex, the summer before I went back to my liberal arts college in New York, now determined to understand why I had thought the world was fair and equal enough that I could avoid feminism even in a body that insisted I could not. Even though reading it, coupled with witnessing my best friend’s new life as a mother and wife, inspired the desire to understand feminism, this essay is not about The Second Sex. That fall, I registered for a class with a superstar third-wave feminist author and writer who was a visiting professor at my college in New York City. The class was on the female bildungsroman. One of the first books we read was Alix Kate Schulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. I understood the scene in which the narrator gets a haircut and has to display it in front of all the menâ€"boyfriends, philosophers, professorsâ€"she’s struggled so hard to impress. But when I wrote an essay response, all I could think to write about was the time I’d shaved my head and people started calling me “sir” all the time in the record store I worked in. This essay is not about Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, either. Next we read Sapphire’s Push. The class was mostly white women, myself included, and some of us questioned what made Precious’s story a feminist text. Finally, someone said, “Did we want to read all books about white women?” and everyone was silent. That time I wrote an essay about my own experience of sexual assault. The sole black woman in the class wrote about what a big deal the prom at her DC high school had been, and how she’d spent thousands of dollars on making sure she had everything she needed for the night to be perfect before deciding not to go at all. But this is not an essay about Push. Next we read an essay about sex work. One by one, women in the class raised their hands and admitted to being pro dommes in their outside-school life, to pissing on men’s feet for money, to camming. It was like watching people expand before my eyes, to see them claim these things and resist feeling the shame that the world told them they should about them. But this essay is not about that essay. After that, we read Julia Serrano’s Whipping Girl. Lights went on in my brain. Of course trans women were women, I had known that, but how had I never seen things like The Crying Game or Silence of the Lambs for what they were? How had I never seen the way femininity was denigrated and tramped down? We talked about the “female experience,” how cis women didn’t always have what they considered the basics of it, how trans women often had much more of it even if they didn’t always have the things cis women did. There were no trans women in the class. The essay I wrote in response was about the Craigslist ad I had answered a few months before asking for a “coach.” When I called the person in question up, she told me she was a trans woman and wanted to pay someone to mock her while she exercised, take her out with a group of friends and humiliate her, do things she thought of as experiences of womanhood she had not had. Terrified and sad, I had invited her to come watch movi es with my female friends and I. She said that was not what she wanted. And, despite all that, this is not an essay about Whipping Girl. This essay is about a book I haven’t yet read. A book that means that I was not an outsider in that room, looking in voyeuristically to the lives of women, one of which I no longer am, one of which I never really was, the self-ghost of which I have been marked by forever. About how I am also not the forces lurking outside and above that room that shaped so many of the stories. A book that shows me the distance between the life I was handed and the life inside. A book about the dead, staticky space between having the “experiences of womanhood” so down to a T that I could sit in a room full of women and identify with everything they said and did and described and wonder why I was still so removed. A book about having no idea who I was, or why feminism, for all its worth and value and all I needed it, wasn’t making me feel free the way those women talked about feeling after class. A book that apologizes for even taking up this space while trying to make sense of the almost thirt y years that I tried to fit into some sort of woman role, some sort of feminist warrior, some sort of butch, some sort of something that my weird body/brain combo would never squeeze itself into. How gentle all that trying to be smaller and less loud and find those spaces made me. How angry it allowed me to be, too, without contradicting myself. How damaged all those coping mechanisms made my life and how I’m still picking through the rubble. How much it hurts to think that as much as I needed that space to learn every bit of what I was and wasn’t, I took that space from someone who probably needed it much more, and how that is the least and most feminist thing I could even think of.