To my surprise, the narrator revealed very little emotion when talking about the scalping of her family and the death of her newborn, but perhaps the influence of these events will resurface later on in the narrative. Unlike the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, this seems to be a more traditional biography, full of dates, places, numbers, etc...the chronology also makes it a much easier read.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Through chapter 3
Through chapter 3, Mary has already experienced a great deal. It seems she is still torn from white culture and Indian culture, stuck between the savage and the civilized. While she's in this inbetween state, she bounces from yearning for home to loving the Indian life and her new Indian "sisters." This brings up the idea of identity and the ability to reshape it. When can you actually consider yourself part of a different culture? Is there a certain time that must elapse, a certain event that must occur? It is the same as the concept of maturity. When do you become a man, a woman?
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3 comments:
I think that the question Alex raises about identity and belonging to a certain group is really interesting. I feel that what determines our culture or sex is our understanding of our culture or sex. If I consider myself a woman, I must be a woman. Going back to Mary, although it takes her some time to get used to Indian culture, I think she did manage to adopt it. When she was given the choice to return to the civilized world she chose to stay with the Indians. Of course, there are other things that might have influenced her decision - everyone she knew and loved at that point was Indian, and it would have been hard to leave them. But I think it was at least partially because of her identifying herself as one of them.
Can anyone be entirely a part of a culture? I think everyone bears a sense of alienation in any society he/she is in, whether it be ethnical, cultural, or gender. Because each of us have different experiences and thoughts we can understand Jemison's confusion and lonliness, no matter how familiar we are to the society in which we have been taking part.
I definitely agree with Wanda in principle--any sort of society or culture naturally has some type of disconnect with those that make it up. But Jemison, I think, is a special case and thus warrants special exception--her alienation from her contemporary society far exceeds, for instance, mine from my own. That's not to say that we all don't have our various aversions to aspects of our own culture, and that the ensuing gulf between ourselves and our society is significant. It's simply that Jemison experiences this phenomenon under particularly extraordinary circumstances.
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