(1) Presentation on the process of reading the image of “fire” in William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”: Link to Google Presentation
(2) Essay on the word “plague” in James Baldwin’s essay, “The American Dream and the American Negro.”
In “The American Dream and the American Negro,” James Baldwin evaluates the issue of prejudice in America towards black people in terms of achieving the American Dream. In one of statements on the perils of racism, he argues that white southerners’ “moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color” (635). In this statement, Baldwin appeals to the religious sentiments of the American south in his accusation that the white southern racist is suffering from a moral failing. Moreover, Baldwin’s use of “plague” as a metaphor for racism invokes a powerful image on the immorality, contagion, and sickness of racism that taints the lives of all Americans caught into the culture of hatred.
When Baldwin states that the white southerners’ moral lives are plagued, he is referring to the hate that is in their hearts. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, plague can be defined as an “affliction, calamity, evil” or as a “divine punishment.” Morality deals with the nature of right or wrong. If infected with the plague called color, the white southerners would have no sense of right and wrong. They wouldn’t understand that it is wrong to look down on others only based on the color of their skin. Baldwin thus presents racial discrimination as a disease Americans should fear. This fear is intended to appeal to the doubts and morals of his audience.
James Baldwin conveys a sense of mystification. He doesn’t understand how someone could be so hurtful in their actions. In his most dramatic reversal of the effects of racism in American culture, Baldwin states, “Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breast. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse” (635). His only way to describe these actions is as a disease. The disease is not inherent in the violated black woman; it is not she who is the cause of violence or spread of disease. Rather, the problem of race lies in the breast of the American who discriminates against other Americans according to the color of their skin. The only way something so evil and punishing could spread with such ease is through plague. Appropriately, another definition for the word plague is “an infectious disease.” Baldwin’s call to action lies in the stop of hatred.
Although Baldwin doesn’t repeat the word plague, the entire essay relates to the plague called color. He discusses the manner in which American life has “spell[ed] out that you are a worthless human being” to create sympathy for the young black boy. He also mentions that the black man will realize that his children and his grandchildren will be affected and there is nothing that he can do to “escape the trap.” This brings me to compare the trap to another definition of plague: the Bubonic Plague. Once one was infected with the Bubonic Plague there was nothing that could be done. There is no automatic cure, and nothing to slow the infection. Through this extended metaphor of the plague, Baldwin makes a passionate appeal for taking action against racial discrimination, rather than standing by and waiting for improvement to take place on its own, as Buckley ineffectually argues. Baldwin knows that his existence as an African American was infected by the same kind of plague: one that can only be stopped by taking drastic measures.
(3) Excerpt of a discussion on the “crumpled glove” in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse:
In To the Lighthouse (1927),the artist Lily Briscoe muses that to penetrate the essence and identity of Mrs. Ramsay, one needed “fifty pairs of eyes to see with” (198). She imagines that various sets of eyes would “steal through keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent in the window alone” (198), thus capturing a successive external portrait of Mrs. Ramsay in all her settings. Other pairs would pass into Mrs. Ramsay’s consciousness to see what “stirred and trembled in her mind” and unveil responses to questions of perception: “What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke?” (198).
Yet to fully embrace Mrs. Ramsay’s being, even these “[f]ifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with” (198), thinks Lily. She romanticizes the “chambers of the mind and heart” hidden within Mrs. Ramsay, imagining them as “treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything” (51). Lily, without fifty pairs of eyes (unlike the novelist), raises the question that has forever plagued writers, artists, and philosophers, that is how “did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were” (51)? Yet even “unsealed” in the eyes of the novelist, identity is slippery, which Lily begins to realize over the course of the novel. Her evolved understanding of identity is accompanied by the alternate wonder of “how many shapes one person might wear” (195).
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Mrs. Ramsay’s death is noted in “Time Passes” through an image of absence, when Mr. Ramsay, “stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty” (128). The negation of her physical presence outlines the remaining traces of her spiritual presence symbolically in his arms. Lily’s contemplation of Mrs. Ramsay’s identity questions: “How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?” (49). The essence she seeks lies in this “crumpled glove,” which signifies the absence of her flesh, of her visible presence, and in the end what remains are the traces or imprints of Mrs. Ramsay’s character.
This notion of absence conjoins the theory of relations that surrounds an invisible center. Lily’s desire for “fifty pairs of eyes” must be adjusted to acknowledge that, on the one hand, many of these “eyes” are internal visions of Mrs. Ramsay, and on the other hand, these eyes are always surrounding Mrs. Ramsay but never depending upon one positivist, synchronic point, so that the final portrait of Mrs. Ramsay is based on a multiplicity that resides beyond time and space and therefore in a cumulative mental image from which Mrs. Ramsay is physically absent.