Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History Emeritus at Princeton University, published her notorious work, The History of White People in March of 2010. Notably, while Painter was writing and completing her book, the United States was at the same time undergoing monumental change—both in political and social spheres. Just over a year prior…
Category: Critical Analyses
“After the condition of the mother”: An Analysis of the 1662 Act in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
In his chapter on the “Mythic Dimensions of American Capitalism,” Richard Hughes presents the concept of “systemic racism,” which he defines as “a form of racism that is embedded into the American economic system” (Hughes 189). Still present in modern America, this system “tends to ensure that whites benefit from a capitalist economy while blacks…
“Tied by law and custom”: Assessing Justifications for Gradual Emancipation in Iola Leroy
Virginia Woolf defines the “chief miracle” of a brilliant piece of writing as its ability to convey a message and move a readership without showing “any signs that [the author’s] circumstances had harmed [their] work in the slightest”; in other words, it is a work written, and thus, interpreted by the audience as one “without…
Religious Irony in Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’ “Talma Gordon”
In his book titled Myths America Lives By, Richard T. Hughes examines the paradoxical inclusion of white supremacist beliefs in the Christian religion, explaining that in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, not only were the majority of white Christians blind to this inconsistency, they had (whether subconsciously or not) grafted it into the doctrine as a…
A Paratextual Analysis of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth
The analysis in this essay centers on the Penguin Books Inc. 1998 publication of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a version based on the 1884 edition. While Truth’s narrative was originally published in 1850, the 1884 version houses content from all previous editions—a compilation of material from those published in Boston, New York, and Battle…
Linguistic Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 97-99
While my favorite sonnet will always be the beautiful and inspiring 116, I was taken by a new group of Shakespearean lines as I read through them this time. Sonnets 97-99, equally as passionate as my preferred, speak to the troubled hearts of separated lovers. I appreciated the connection between the three of them, and…
The Love Speech of Cesario in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
The most striking part of this play for me is the level of cultural insight into Elizabethan society that the modern audience is able to gain from the duo-sex character of Cesario. In this character, we can hear the thoughts and emotions of an Elizabethan woman while watching the socially acceptable and expected actions of…
The Mythic Voice of Shakespeare’s Folkloric Characters: Tracing Old-English Poetic Structure in Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest
In first-century England, Anglo-Saxon poetry consisted of oral verse accompanied by music, often touching on subjects such as hardships and bravery, wisdom gained through suffering, ancestral honor, and cultural legends. The Anglo-Saxon poet, or ‘scop,’ would often weave myth and folklore into true historical accounts, providing the people with a means of learning the historical…
Genderlect in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”
I recently read for the first time Earnest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and was struck by several dialogues in which the author presented his interpretation of a female voice. I remember thinking at a certain point that all the women in his novel seemed rather disagreeable in their speech, and furthermore, that I…
The Sound and the Fury Linguistic Analysis: Quentin’s Speech
Quentin’s chapter, “June Second, 1910,” although narrated by an ostensibly disturbed voice that alternates between distant memory and present observation, begins with consistent and coherent language. Quentin’s grammar appears in tact and his syntax maintains its sense throughout the difficult subject matter. Toward the end of the chapter, however, the narrator’s language begins to fall…