Even more striking is the speaker's statement that she loves all of the children she aborted. The language of the poem certainly seems structured to convey the image of motherly love. She speaks with longing and regret about the things her children will never do, such as the baby games and giggles, growing, marriage, and love. However, the speaker begins by making it clear that she is not romanticizing motherhood. She speaks of children she will never beat or neglect, as well as missing the rewards of motherhood. These statements seem aimed to convey the speaker's understanding of what she may have done to her children if she had chosen to carry them.
In fact, it is those statements that resolve the ambiguity in the poem. The speaker is filled with a tremendous self-loathing. The speaker says that she has sinned, that she has poisoned her children's breaths, and seized their lives and their...
Mother, by Gwendolyn Brooks. Specifically, it will look critically at the poem, and what other critics have to say about it. THE MOTHER Set in Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks fashioned one of the earliest portraits of urban, working-class Black womanhood published in the United States" (Aptheker 61). Brook's poem "The Mother," written in 1945, is a lament to a woman's unborn babies who never lived because of
female body -- the sum of its parts? In short story, novel, and poetic depictions of Gillman, Brooks, and Piercy despised flower, called a yellow weed by most observers. A trapped and voiceless bodily entity, like a ghost, perhaps behind a surface of peeling yellow wallpaper. A plastic doll with yellow hair with pneumatic dimensions and candied cherry lips. These three contrasting images all have been used to characterize
This counterculture movement was greeted with enormous publicity and popular interest, and contributed to changes in American culture (Law pp). Legacies of this era include "a willingness to challenge authority, greater social tolerance, the sense that politics is personal, environmental awareness, and changes in attitudes about gender roles, marriage, and child rearing" (Law pp). Moreover, during the 1960's, health foods and organic foods became popular among the children of the
This sentence, although it talks about bowels, is really describing the mother's love of the baby. This story is written like a detective story. It is very difficult to determine which woman is telling the truth and to determine if King Solomon is actually a bad person or a good person. It does not give the names of the women. They are simple referred to as one woman and the
This is evident from the first as the poet writes, I am inside someone -- who hates me. I look out from his eyes (1-3). This approach allows him to take a jaundiced view of himself and criticize his own shortcomings, as if they were those of someone else. He says he hates himself, meaning more that he hates some of the things he has done and that he may expect
African-American Literature -- Compare and Contrast The two stories selected for this first comparison, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and the short letter from Jourdon Anderson, "To My Old Master," are both extremely touching, honest, enlightening and historically precious pieces of literature. To begin with, Anderson's letter to Colonel P.H. Anderson reveals a number of key things about the life of a male slave during
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