Hungry Heroines and Tragic Mulattos

After our rather critical discussions of Helga Crane in class, Zoey identified her with a literary type: the tragic mulatto.  Now I'm reading a collection of essays about Norwegian-American women (Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities and Identities, eds. Bergland and Lahlum) that includes one on another literary type: the hungry heroine.  Ingrid Urberg explains that the type is found first in European folklore and then represented in immigrant fiction, more specifically works by and about Norwegian-American women.  Then she explores the translation of this fairy-tale type in several novels considering how these female protagonists move from their "lack" through a "quest" and achieve a "reward" in a new home.

In part her purpose is to counteract the common impression that Beret, in Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, is the prototypical Norwegian immigrant woman: reluctant, depressive, and yet strong.  In some aspects a tragic type.  As I read Urberg's essay I was reminded that no single fictional character can adequately portray the wide range of human experience and response to common situations.  I wondered once again about what might be learned by considering  Quicksand both as a novel of the Harlem Renaissance and as an immigrant novel.  I'm not at all sure that this would change our response to Helga, but the larger field of comparison might yield useful insights about the intertwining of race, ethnicity, and gender in the early 20th century.

Norton on the Fair

 











 "The great Fair was indeed a superb and appropriate symbol of our great nation, in its noble general design and in the inequalities of its execution; in its unexampled display of industrial energy and practical capacity; in the absence of the higher works of creative imagination; in its incongruities, its mingling of noble realities and ignoble pretenses, in its refinements check-by-jowl with vulgarities, in its order and its confusion--in its heterogeneousness and its unity."

This comment by Harvard President Charles Eliot Norton, an official of the Columbian Exposition, gives evidence that at least some of those involved in its planning and execution were well aware of the ideological issues being played out there.  While scholars and other observers today often suggest that the White City represented an effort by an emerging elite to impose their largely middle class values and the Midway provided an alternative popular culture, perhaps the Fair also could be seen as an effort to find a way for multiple cultures to exist alongside, even over-lapping, one another.

Optimism, pessimism, dissatisfaction, hope

As we come back to these attitudes, again and again, this from theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether seems appropriate:

"If we are 'optimistic,' it suggests that change is inevitable and will happen in the 'natural' course of things, and so we need not make much effort ourselves. Someone else will take care of it. If we are 'pessimistic,' change is impossible, and therefore it is useless to try. In either case we have the luxury, as critical but comfortable elites in the United States, to question the present system without being responsible for it. What we need is neither optimism nor pessimism, in these terms, but committed love." - Rosemary Radford Ruether

Making visible

THIS from the October 23, 2011 Mpls Strib, an op-ed about poverty and children.  I could not get access to the article she mentions in which there are photos of kids in designer clothes.  She attempts to counter those images of children whose middle-class parents spent significant money on their soon-to-be-outgrown "luxe" outfits with statistics about the increasing number of Twin Cities kids whose parents' income is so low that they qualify for free lunch (35%) and others numbers about the dire situation of children living in poverty whom the rest of us are unlikely to notice.  She suggests that we are unlike to notice them because our daily lives do not intersect: we live and move in different parts of the city.  And, we don't notice them because the media we do see shows us those other kids in fancy, expensive clothing.

We talked about this in class from a couple of angles:
1) How does the situation she describes compare to that documented by Jacob Riis' photos and Hull House reports?

2) How effective is her op-ed in comparison to Riis' photos and Hull House reports?

A very important response to the first required us to move beyond the easy generalization that "the poor you have with you always."  We needed to consider both the degree of economic stratification in the USA at a given time and the actual conditions in which children in those various "classes" lived.  A parallel can be drawn to statistics about literacy.  In that case we must ask both what constitutes literacy and how many people achieve it.  What counted a century and a half ago would not count as literacy today. And today we'd probably need to add consideration of access to information technology to assessment of the ability to read.

Our response to the second seemed, at first, to assume that visibility is necessary if the general public is to respond to the situation of the poor.  We noted that a person or group of people can be invisible because there is no portrayal of their situation or because that portrayal is lost in the blizzard of information.  A variation on the second is that the viewer becomes numb to the images.  The Hull House strategy included both providing decision makers with many reports with many facts and taking up residence in those "congested areas."  At its best this strategy encouraged the residents to consider real people who were neither reduced to aggregated statistics nor to two-dimensional images.  Thus their neighbors were both visible and known in 3-dimensions.

Out in Chicago: History Museum Exhibit

Link to exhibit

After our reading of Gay New York this exhibit from the Chicago History Museum is of interest now that we're concentrating on that midwestern City.  The linked page includes photos of some items in the exhibit, both historical and contemporary.  These recall themes we have encountered before.  There is a photo from Bronzeville, Chicago's African-American neighborhood on the near southside, recalling the intersection of New York's "gay world" and Harlem.  The page also notes events including a walking tour of the Andersonville neighborhood, home to Ann Sather's Scandinavian restaurant and Women and Children First, a venerable feminist bookstore.  The first is a legacy of the neighborhood's history as a Scandinavian immigrant community; likely the second signals the influx of lesbian residents in the 1980s.