Response to reading for 31 July

It was a little slow for me getting started with this book. Maybe I was too tired when I started reading. In any case, the farther I read, the more I liked it and once I reached halfway, I realized I didn't want to stop. I did, though, to write. So here goes.
One passage that I found interesting not only because of the way it fit into this text but because of some of the things we've been talking about in class was when Charity is talking about whether Harney likes her or not and it says, "The signs of his liking were manifest enough; but it was hard to guess how much they meant, because his manner was so different from anything North Dormer had ever shown her. He was at once simpler and more deferential than any one she had known; and sometimes it was just when he was simplest that she most felt the distance between them." First off, this reminded me of Sula because of the misunderstandings between Nell and Sula that resulted because of their different life experiences. I also think that this passage stuck out to me because obviously people's homes are important. Charity's coming from the Mountain is obviously central to the story and her character builds itself around the fact... especially her being different from everyone in North Dormer. Harney is interesting to her because he's from somewhere bigger, more mysterious. I kept this passage in mind as I read and thought about their relationship, and it seems that the distance between them is maintained, at least so far, but that, as they build experiences together, it becomes more negligible. I think that this would fit well into our discussion about people being close even when they don't have to talk because of the way they interact and because of the experiences that they share. I don't know how the relationship with Harney and Charity will turn out. I hesitate to say I hope it's for the better for fear of having my own heart broken.
Another passage that stood out to me was when Charity determines not to go in to see Harney when she's spying on him in Miss Hatchard's. She says, "She did not know why he was going; but since he was going she felt she must do nothing to deface the image of her that he carried away. If he wanted her he must seek her: he must not be surprised into taking her as girls like Julia Hawes were taken...." I guess it initially stood out because relationships between girls and boys are so much different today, and this was a good example of a woman who wants to be pursued by a man and who sees it as her duty to maintain her purity, even if it means passing up a chance to be with him, so that he can decide to be with her. I also think it stood out because of how important she considers his impression of her and how she doesn't seem to care later when the town thinks they're sneaking around together. Mr. Royall says she's proud, but I think her pride may be a cover for the insecurity that she feels about her past, which comes out conspicuously when she overhears Mr. Royall speaking with Harney and at other points in time when she wonder where she came from or who her parents are. Anyways, I think it's funny that later she "sneer[s] at herself for not having used the arts that might have kept him." Good stuff.
Just for fun, another passage I really liked was when she started spying on Harney and it says, "He was there, a few feet away; and while her soul was tossing on seas of woe he had been quietly sitting at his drawing-board. The sight of those two hands, moving with their usual skill and precision, woke her out of her dream." I think it's scary how bad things can get in our heads when we don't know what's going on. Like the Morrison quote that Donna read during class. But this also reminded me of a discussion I had about whether being in love makes everything else in life matter more or less, which, in a way, relates to the whole "Make Me Better" concept. Some people say being in love is like being in a dream. Seeing Harney woke Charity from a dream. I think being in love can make life seem more important, can make you notice things like how beautiful his hands are and can make the whole world seem more beautiful and worth noticing. But apparently it also makes things worth worrying about as well....

Response to readings for 27 July

I guess some of the most obvious similarities were the emotions that the girls experienced because of the way they were treated for being "different." They were both scared, confused, and angry. They were also both bent on success, or it seemed that way. Like because they were treated as inferiors, they had to prove themselves. This was interesting to me because I think it's much more often the case that being treated as inferior makes people believe that they are inferior. In another one of my classes, we read a couple of books about kids from "bad" neighborhoods who were more than intellectually capable of going to college and/or getting decent jobs, but who didn't believe they had the ability because they were always told that they didn't. One of the differences that I think is important is that the Indian girl is of "pure blood" and comes from a family that is 100% ethnically the same as she is. Her mother has an idea of what she should do, which is return to her family, but she chooses not to, which results in her being rejected by her mother. Sui, on the other hand, doesn't have a real home in the first place. She is torn between two homelands, her mother's and her father's, neither of which she considers her own. Her parents seem to provide little guidance as to how she should feel about her nationality or what she should do because of it. Unlike Zitkala, she doesn't even have a starting point against which she could rebel. I think the differences between the two girls and the people around them were different too. Zitkala was one of a number of Indians, who stood in stark contrast to the missionaries around them. The differences between her and her surroundings were very pronounced. Sui, though, was mistaken for white, Japanese, and Spanish or Mexican in San Francisco. She didn't fit in, really, with anyone. I guess that's what leads up to her statement at the end about valuing the individual.

Response to readings for 25 July

"Seventeen Syllables": I think the story follows a romantic narrative. Rosie is obviously falling for Jesus but they're young and she doesn't know what to do about it. Then there's the whole second plot of how her mom didn't marry for true love and now she's trapped and stifled and all of that so she doesn't want her daughter to get married and end up like her. I think the thing that's different about this, at least when I read it, is that at the end, it seems to me that the whole time Rosie just wants some kind of love but she doesn't get it from her parents and now her parent wants to take away the prospect of Jesus's love. I think this text is interesting because of the way culture and class play into it. And because of the different characters' conflicting ideas of love. Rosie's mom turned romantic love into something bad because her experiences made it impossible for her not to. For Rosie, it's still something new and exciting and confusing, and I don't think her parents are helping to clear anything up.
"Men in Your Life": This piece is pretty funny. I think it plays into the traditional romantic narratives of loving somebody for who they are and for who you are when you're together instead of because of how they look on paper. I guess the interesting part of this story for me is how gossip-centered it seems and it reminds me of this "Would you rather" questions that asked if you'd rather sleep with somebody famous but not be able to tell anyone about it or be able to tell everyone you slept with somebody famous and have them believe you but never actually do it. I don't know if that made sense. Anyways... I guess this isn't really like that but I thought it was funny because she doesn't even mention Eddie for a while and it's almost like her thoughts only come out because she's telling them to somebody else, but they've obviously been there if she and Eddie talked about getting married. It reminds me a little bit of "Hitch" too because she likes Eddie for his little eccentricities even though he isn't the obvious choice to the world.

Movie blog

I have to do this one now because I'm positive I won't be the only one who picks it.... I'm not a huge fan of romantic movies, but last semester "The Notebook" was on TV every two hours or so during finals week so every break that we got, my roommate and I watched it and I ended up really liking it. I'm guess most of you know what happens in the movie. It's the story of a couple that meets during a summer (I think) and the girl is wealthy and the boy isn't and they're in love but then her parents make her move away and he tries to write to her but her mom steals the letters so they don't talk for a really long time and she ends up being engaged to this other guy but then she sees this article about how the other guy built the house she told him she wanted so she goes to visit him and they fall for each other again and stuff and they end up together. But the underlying narrative in the movie is this old guy in a nursing home or something reading the story of these two kids to a woman who has Alzheimers or something and it ends up that they are the two kids in the story and she had written it for him to read to her so she would remember their story. I think the reason I like the movie, aside from the fact that the whole Alzheimers thing is pretty creative, is because they don't pretend like their relationship is perfect. My favorite scene is when he's trying to convince her to stay with him and it goes something like this:
Noah: You're bored! You're bored and you know it! You wouldn't be here if there weren't something missing.
Allie: You arrogant son of a bitch!
Noah: Would you just stay with me?
Allie: Stay with you? What for? Look at us, we are already fighting.
Noah: Well that's what we do. We fight. You tell me when I'm being an arrogant son of a bitch and I tell you when you are being a pain in the ass. Which you are 99% of the time. I'm not afraid to hurt your feelings. You have like a two second rebound rate and you're back to doing the next pain in the ass thing.
Allie: So what.
Noah: So it's not going to be easy. It's going to be really hard. And we're going to have to work at this every day. But I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, every day.
I like it because it's more realistic than the romance shows that make you think love is nothing but happiness all of the time. In fact, I guess he says it's a pain in the ass 99% of the time....

Response to reading for 20 July

So there was a lot to choose from in here, huh? I guess I'll just throw a couple out there.
One passage that gets to me is when Sula comes back and Nel recognizes that, "Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself." I think this stuck out to me especially because of our discussion in class about how Sula isn't even really a character until she's described in terms of her friendship with Nel. I guess I've seen them as two part of one person... kind of like the Usher twins in Poe's short story. They aren't really whole when they aren't together. This is really driven home for me when Nel can't function after Jude leaves, but at the end of the story, she realizes that it's Sula that she missed all along.
Then, another passage that sticks out is when Sula says to Nel, "Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else's. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain't that something? A secondhand lonely." I still don't really know how to approach Sula. I see her and Nel as inseparable, really, like Eva does I guess. So when Sula describes the differences in their lonelinesses, I think that they're really both missing the same thing - each other... and themselves.

Response to reading for 18 July

The first passage that I'd like to respond to is when Helene smiles on the train. "Then, for no earthly reason, at least no reason that anybody could understand, certainly no reason that Nel understood then or later, she smiled. Like a street pup that wags its tail at the very doorjamb of the butcher shop he has been kicked away from only moments before, Helene smiled. Smiled dazzlingly and coquettishly at the salmon-colored face of the conductor." I think that it's interesting that the only people whose reactions to Helen's smile aren't described are herself and the person the smile was directed at (the conductor). The only effects of Helene's smile were embarrassment and anger. All Helene accomplished was cheapening herself and her race. Although I understand the embarrassment and the anger, I also believe I sympathize with Helene. I'm not trying to justify what she did, but I think she was out of options. I believe she was searching for something to latch on to, something that would allow her to maintain some sense of pride, even though all she ended up doing was degrading herself and her sex. Stuff like this happens to me a lot more than it should. One example that comes to mind is when I broke up with my last boyfriend. I wasn't terribly upset about the breakup, but I think I felt like I was losing something that was part of me and I wanted to make sure that I had a life of my own outside of the relationship. So, after we broke up, I called a boy I had dated in high school who I knew (unfortunately for him... I told you girls can be manipulative) still liked me and tried to tell myself that, since he still liked me, it was good for me to talk to him and make him feel better. In truth, I was being disgustingly sneaky and selfish and I was actually caring about him less by talking to him and not giving him the space he needed to get over our relationship, but at the time I thought that I could use what we used to have in order to feel better about myself. I realize none of you know me that well, so I hope you don't think I'm some evil, conniving psychopath.... Even though this passage draws vivid images and conveys pretty clear messages about why it wasn't ok for Helene to smile at the conductor, I think it's maybe most sad to think about the reasons that Helene smiled, even if Nel couldn't think of any. If we weren't supposed to think about the reasons, I don't think Morrison would have drawn the sentence about not knowing the reasons out for so long.

The next passage that stood out to me was when Hannah asks Eva if Eva loved her children and Eva launches into this huge speech about how she showed her love by keeping them fed and alive. I guess if I had to quote a small part of the passage that stuck out to me, it would be at first when Eva replies to Hannah's questions with, "No. I don't reckon I did. Not the way you thinkin'." Then she turns it around and says, "Them big old eyes in your head would a been two holes full of maggots if I hadn't." The passage makes me think about the different kinds of love in the story. Eva loved her children, and the only way she had time to show them was by keeping them fed and... well... you guys know what she did in the outhouse with Plum. Sick. In any case, I think that a modern misconception tells us that love is something natural and something that feels good and something with conditions. I also think that people expect to be loved the same way they love others, and that's not always the case. I haven't read this book, but I know people who have read a book about the "love languages" and how some people only want you to show you care about them by spending time with them. Others want to be touched and others want gifts and other stuff. What it comes down to is that we all have different ideas of what love is. I've actually been doing a kind of study about love lately and I've been learning some interesting things. The assignment schedule asks for personal stories, so here's my two cents.... Perfect love is a lot of things, and Jesus is the only human example of it that we have. Love is self-sacrificing and it serves the Beloved and that's what Eva was doing when she was working to feed her kids. I'm not saying that, today, a man who doesn't spend any time with his children because he's working all the time is blameless. Children need love in a lot of ways, and not only monetary, but I think Eva was loving her children in the only way she knew how. I also don't necessarily support the pride she seems to take in her sacrifice. Without going into more of this Bible study on love, I think it's interesting how love can be so circumstantial in society. It's all about perspective to us, when it should really be about thinking about the person we love. We're not perfect though, eh? Anyways, I think I've had similar experiences in relationships. I remember when my first boyfriend moved away and I was angry because he never cried about it and I didn't understand how he could not cry if he was upset, but he had already moved almost every year of his life before that and he was probably more upset about it than I was; he just had a different way of showing it. Some of the ways that my love for other people has come out in my life hasn't necessarily been in what our culture would consider loving behavior. I have had to cut off relationships with people (like the boy from my example in the first passage) because I loved them too much to hurt them by letting them rely on me. I have loved people by going with them to places that I really didn't want to go because I wanted them to know that I supported them. I think that love has been especially difficult in black society since it was for so long rewarded only by the ripping apart of families etc. The love in Sula, I believe, runs deeper than the love that we think always feels so good. It makes me kind of excited to read the second half of the book.

Response to readings for 17 July

"The Revolt of Mother": The passage that struck me the most was toward the beginning of the story when Sarah is talking to Nanny and says, "You ain't found out we're women-folks, Nanny Penn.... You ain't seen enough of the men-folks yet to. One of these days you'll find it out, an' then you'll know that we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an' how we'd ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence, an' not complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather." The passage was intersting to me at first because of the last bit when she says that women only know what men think they do. It makes me think of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" when the women work to put the idea of the girl going back to school into the man's head so he'll think it was his idea, otherwise he wouldn't think it was a good one. I thought it was funny, though, that she says women are supposed to figure men in with God, like they should hang on every word that men say and should never question whether it's right. As I read through the rest of the story, though, I found that the first part of the passage summed up the result of such thinking. Sarah says, "You ain't found out we're women-folks yet.... You ain't seen enough of the men-folks yet to." This suggests that women's identity comes solely from their interactions and relationships with men. Throughout the story, Sarah is known mostly as "Mother," that is, until she acts out of line with her husband's will. I think that Freeman makes a distinction between being a woman and being an individual, though, because Sarah's identity does not rest on her relationship with her husband or with other men.
"Trifles": "What do you suppose she was so nervous about?" I thought it was funny when Mrs. Hale asked Mrs. Peters this question because I assumed they already had ideas about Mrs. Wright's deeds. For me, this question illustrates both the appearance of women that men choose not to look past and also the depth of meaning in what women say and think. The men believe that the women are asking questions about "trifles" and that they are unconcerned with what is most important. In fact, the women are noticing evidence that the men find themselves too important to consider. I think that this also illustrates a problem with communication between men and women. Men often assume that women mean no more and no less than what they say. Perhaps this is because men do not say more or less than what they mean or than what they are thinking. But women tend to talk around subjects, to explore and insinuate and attempt to draw out information from others in order to confirm or deny their own thoughts. Obviously, this play speaks to the ignorance of men in assuming that women are so simple-minded, and I think this quote was one of my first indications to that end.
"As Children Together": One passage that stood out to me described Victoria's husband "cursing holy blood at the table/where nightly a pile of white shavings/is paid from the edge of his knife." The father in the beginning of the poem created the same image, which suggests that, despite her determination ("I am going to have it."), Victoria has ended up in the same place she started. I think that the men are almost more telling than the women in this poem. The women look for any means of escape, but the men are engaged in drinking and pointless whittling. The men, as far as the reader is concerned, can do whatever they want, otherwise they would not be mentioned, but they waste their lives away. If Forche wanted to explain the inability of women to overcome merely their physical environments, men would not be part of the picture, but they are overwhelmingly present, and offer no escape.

Response to images from readings for 13 July 2006

"Daystar": "So she lugged a chair behind the garage/to sit out the children's naps." I think this passage got to me more after having read the poem once. At the end, the speaker says, "she would open her eyes/and think of the place that was her/for an hour--where/she was nothing,/pure nothing, in the middle of the day." The fact that this woman's paradise is a place where she is "nothing" is fascinating and disturbing to me. In a way, it reminds me of the "Lady Lazarus" poem where she would rather be dead than deal with the monotony of life. Sometimes women see the roles of mother and wife as their life goals or as the keys to fulfillment, but this woman's desire is to get out of those roles and to have no role at all. I like the juxtaposition of the nothingness with the simple images that fill up the woman's life (her child wondering about her or the diapers she has cleaned or the doll she will have to pick up) because it isn't always the big parts of life that wear us down. It also kind of reminds me of the part in "The Hours" when the mother leaves her child with a friend (or neighbor? I don't remember...) and goes and reads Mrs. Dalloway in a hotel room all afternoon. We wouldn't think of her life as particularly difficult, but she dreams of being responsible only to herself.
"A Pair of Silk Stockings": To start off, a passage that reminds me of "Daystar" says, "She had no time--no second of time to devote to the past. The needs of the present absorbed her every faculty. A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily tomorrow never comes." Another instance of what would appear to be a woman wishing for nothingness, and on the next page, after she has started to give in to her temptations, it says, "She was not thinking at all." This kind of reminds me of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" because, in order to give in to their desires or to themselves, women have to cease thinking, because thinking results in an acknowledgment of responsibility and expectation, or, in Mrs. Sommers's case, in "a proper and judicious use of the money." The last line is Mrs. Sommers in a cable car wishing that the ride would never end, but the way that she describes her wish, "a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever," makes it seem like she has discovered herself and the car isn't necessary to her identity. The Mrs. Sommers who desires "a sense of belonging to the well-dressed multitude" isn't a person who emerged because of the money she had; rather, she has always been there and is trapped by responsibility and expectations.
"Why I Want a Wife": I'd like to think that this isn't an accurate description of the reasons men get married. That said, I think my favorite part is near the end: "If, by chance, I find another person more suitable as a wife than the wife I already have, I want the liberty to replace my wife with another one." It reminds me of a warantee or whatever on some kind of product packaging. Or like something a salesman would say to make you want to buy something. I feel like this whole piece is such a hyperbole that anything I notice would be pointless. I think the language that the speaker uses is the most striking aspect of the work for me. The wife is always referred to as "wife" and "person" is only used once (I think), and to describe someone who isn't a wife yet. It's also funny how he objectifies not only women, but also sex by suggesting he can use it to relate to people in what would appear to be some kind of businesslike fashion. I don't know how much more I can write about this one. Maybe these unspoken (well, here they're spoken, but it's not like men would come out and say them) things are what make women want to be nothing rather than wives and mothers?

Collage

Students in an American Literature course at University of North Carolina have created character collages. Take a look.

These are created probably with Adobe Photoshop or some other kind of image editor. I'm not expecting you to work with editing in this way, but it's something you might think about for the next collage. (For the image collage, you just need to put verbal and visual texts juxtaposed against each other in one document, in some interesting and meaningful pattern.) We'll have better image editing capabilities once we get in the Mac lab in GCB.

Response to images from reading for 12 July 2006

I think I'm going to start with the images and see where we go from there.
"The Yellow Wall-Paper": One of the images that strikes me in this story is the woman's thoughts and feelings as ridiculous or laughable. Her husband laughs at her and there's a twisted humor throughout the story and I think it struck me because I know how ridiculous my own thoughts and actions and feelings can be sometimes. I guess I rarely contemplate the damaging effects of always laughing at problems, though. I still believe that women are taken less seriously than men in a lot of cases, but I also have come to realize that I can't always take myself seriously. This isn't making sense anymore. In any case, the woman in the story obviously had problems, but they also obviously weren't as bad until they were ignored. Another image that I think is kind of connected to women being portrayed as ridiculous is women being weak. This character is weak physically and mentally, but it's because she's trapped in a room and treated like a child by her husband. At the same time, it kind of seems like she traps herself because she buys into with what her husband tells her. Like the first time she says he laughs at her and she says that it's expected in marriage. She makes statements like, "What is one to do?" and she puts her writing away because she knows that her husband doesn't like it and she believes whatever he tells her about her condition and about the house or their moving or staying put and doesn't even seem to question whether or not he might be right. In the end, she isn't trapped by her husband anymore, but it doesn't matter because she can't make her own intelligent decisions anyway. It kind of made me think of part of Captivating when Stasi Eldredge talks about how women have a tendency to keep things inside because the men in their lives make them think that they are "too much" to handle. Eventually, though, keeping feelings or thoughts or people locked up doesn't seem to do much good, according to Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
""Ain't I a Woman?": This one conjured up almost a Rosa Parks-like picture for me. I see a woman who is proud of her abilities, but also who is proud of being a woman and who demands the same treatment as other women. I know the black community criticized Truth for advocating women's rights at the expense of African American rights, but, since she was speaking at a Women's Rights Convention, it was only natural to do so. I see Truth as a woman fighting for the rights of any group that is oppressed, but not necessarily a woman who wants equality with men. I think it slightly resembles Gilman's point when the husband in "The Yellow Wall-Paper" refuses to acknowledge his wife as a capable human being. Truth and Gilman both recognize that part of their humanity is lost when women are ignored, repressed, or even laughed at.
"Lady Lazarus": The last two stanzas were packed the most impact for me. Lazarus was raised from the dead by God. At the end of the poem, I picture the speaker (although you can never declare without a doubt, the poem is blatantly autobiographical) as perceiving herself as having assumed more power than God and she warns both God and the devil that she will rise up of her own will. I find it interesting that, during the poem, is little more than a body to those who supposedly care about her and rejoice in her failure in attempting suicide. To outsiders, she is a woman and is unworthy of more thought than the Nazis gave the Jews. But in the last lines, she overcomes her position and, perhaps because of her position, devours the men who put her there. Sadly enough, this reminds me of "The Yellow Wall-Paper" because both women end up being the opposite of what the men in their lives are trying to make them. Plath commits suicide shortly after her poem is published, if I remember correctly, and the speaker in the poem ends up devouring the men who want to believe she is good for little more than making lampshades and soap out of. The woman in Gilman's story ends up being crazy, while the husband believes that he is fixing her. Funny.
"When I Was Growing Up": My favorite image in this poem is when the speaker describes her belief that she was "an exotic gardenia" when she was out with a white man. The whole stanza is beautiful and terrible at the same time. What she thinks she desires is to be white, but when she is out with a white man, it is her race that makes her feel special. It's just sick that it took a white man to make her feel like a real woman, because she follows the stanza up immediately with a description of her disgust with Chinese men. Her desire to fit the stereotype is such a recurrent theme in women's literature; a lot of times, it's even a theme when the characters seem to be proud of their not fitting a stereotype. The short story that I read, "Big Thing" was all about a girl who put on a front by acting proud of not being on a diet when she secretly despised herself for not fitting the stereotype. This girl seems to be proud of being Chinese when she says she feels like an exotic flower, but she obviously wants to fit the stereotype since the poem is about how she "longed to be white."
"The Thirty Eighth Year": The same kind of thing comes up for me with this poem. When the speaker says that she "expected to be/smaller than this... I had expected/more than this," I think of why "smaller" would be "more," and stereotypes about how women should be came up again. The problem is that her repetition of "ordinary" and the poem's focus on how plain of a woman she is attests to the fact that the majority of women aren't necessarily extraordinary by societal, stereotypical standards. It replays the theme in the last poem and in "Big Thing" by illustrating the desire that women have to fit stereotypes, but the unreality of doing so.

First Day Response

We were supposed to pick a text that we were interested in. I chose Captivating, which is technically by a woman and her husband, Stasi and John Eldredge, but it specifies who is writing and it’s mostly by a woman and for women, so I figured it worked. It would be hard to sum up the work in a few short sentences. It discusses women’s desire to be beautiful and to be loved and then explores the different ways that women have sought out validation of love and beauty in ways that have led to destruction. It illustrates how women attempt to define themselves in terms of how the world responds to them and the consequential assault that is waged on women’s hearts. It also looks at how men are able to make the problem better and/or worse, and explains some of the effects that destructive searches for love and beauty have on individuals and on society. The point that Stasi ends up making is that only the One who created women’s hearts knows how to fulfill and satisfy them. As far as being “womanly” goes, I think it is and it isn’t. The book is womanly in that it addresses problems that I believe are common to all women, which surprised me and is what ended up getting me to finish the book. To be honest, I stopped reading it after the first five or six chapters because she made it seem like women could just recognize that we were looking for confirmation in the wrong places and could change it easily enough, but I hadn’t found that to be the case. Stasi talks about women feeling bad because they think they overwhelm the men in their lives, and women feeling perpetually lonely for indiscernible reasons. I think that, even though women come from innumerable backgrounds and experiences, she gets at the root of a common struggle – to know that we are loved. At the same time, when I think of something today as “womanly,” I think of the WWII poster with the “We Can Do It!” slogan and the woman showing her bicep. Captivating doesn’t stress equality at all in the terms we think of it today. She explains that women’s hearts were designed to desire love, and that men’s were designed to desire respect; we get both love and respect from the Lord, and we assume complementary roles. That doesn’t mean that Stasi thinks women should stay at home and cook or not play sports, but it does mean that women’s and men’s needs are different. In today’s society, I think that women try to deny their own hearts in order to reach what they perceive to be equality. Stasi publishes a book, which would argue against her being opposed to women’s equality in terms of intelligence or abilities to influence society, but she does represent a position that I think is frowned upon by society at large as old-fashioned and weak, but which I think, if given a chance, both men and women would find more fulfilling.

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog for English/WGST 2180! I look forward to learning with you over the next four weeks.