Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant

The essay explored various aspects of black culture through the Miss America competition, primarily black women and society's ideas on black women. The author explores racial pride, the politics of the competition itself, and racism. The author, Gerald Early, is an essayist and American culture critic. He has written on many different topics, African American culture such as in this essay is just one of those topics. The essay is written in a fairly modern context, having been written in 1990, it is one of the most recent of the essays, and the issues explored in the essay are still relevant to this day, as black women and the black community overall struggles to find their identity, similar to the way women were discussed in the previous essay I read. The purpose of the essay was to explore modern society and the way black people are treated in our society, and describe the struggle for African Americans that persists to this day. He uses many anecdotes throughout the essay, primarily about his daughters and his experiences raising them. The primary audience would probably be other black people, probably young black women, seeing as they are the main subject of the essay, as well as who it seems he is addressing. He definitely achieves his purpose, exploring many different issues throughout the essay and making sure they all relate to the main topic. He uses the example of how his older daughter once wanted long blonde hair, or the story he ended up with, when his daughters were playing dolls, and Rosalind said to him, "We're not racial. That's old-fashioned. Don't you think so, Daddy? Aren't you tired of all that racial stuff?" I think this was definitely something interesting to include in the essay, and how he ended the essay describing his "stiffness and inflexibility", which is interesting because it means that the older generations are stiff and inflexible and the race issues are still relevant to them, but in the children it is made obvious by the story that they are not nearly as concerned with these issues, and would be content to ignore race altogether, rather than perpetuating racism, which is still continuing to this day, as if made evident by the very recent Ferguson riots over the death of an unarmed black teenager.

Vanessa Williams, the first African American Miss America was mentioned many times throughout the essay.

Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying

The essay was about women, how they lie, and the reasons for this lying. She starts with talking about the old ideas of honor, and how this problem of women lying may have begun. She continues to talk about ways women lie, and how the way they talk to each other and to men is different, and why lying in relationships affects people so much, and how women have only recently begun to discover themselves after so long being under the control of the patriarchy. The author, Adrienne Rich, was a poet, essayist, and feminist, all of which makes sense when reading this essay. She is well known for declining the National Medal of Arts because the House of Representatives ended funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. One of the main strategies I noticed was anaphora and other repetition, such as when she begins three paragraphs with "women have". She also repeats many other phrases throughout the essay, and I think this does help achieve the purpose. The purpose of the essay is to speak to other women in an attempt to describe and explain the phenomenon of female lying. I think she definitely does achieve this purpose, and does it quite well. As the title says, they are "notes" on lying, and how this results from the idea of honor, and how female honor was different from male honor, which resulted in the lying, that "honesty in women has not been considered important. We have been depicted as generically whimsical, deceitful, subtle, vacillating. And we have been rewarded for lying." She explains how this image has led to women lying, and why this doesn't occur in men. It results from being considered inferior to men, expected to be obedient and faithful. We lie in relationships "with people who do not have power over us" because we are so used to doing it in other relationships. She also discusses lesbian women, and how they have been erased throughout history, saying that women who are lesbians are "criminals", or "sick". And finally, she describes how the liar is afraid and lonely, and why lying in relationships is makes us "feel slightly crazy".

The comic below shows some of the ways people lie to each other, many of which were addressed throughout the essay.

The Marginal World

The essay was about the author's experiences at the beach, at the shoreline where the water and land meet. She describes the tide pools and the shoreline, and the almost surreal nature of these places. Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and writer, who was involved in environmental conservation, including the use of chemical pesticides. She wrote a book called Silent Spring, which brought environmental concerns to the minds of the people. This led to a change in pesticide policies, ultimately resulting in the ban of chemicals like DDT. The essay describes a few different locations, such as a cave that is only revealed at the lowest tides, a shoreline at night, and a southern coast. The author's purpose in writing this essay would be to describe these different locations and the emotions she was experiencing as she visited these places. She might also have been attempting to show that places like this are worth saving, to show that the environment is important because there are beautiful places like this. Her audience would be everyone, because everyone shares this experience, but probably primarily young adults because she uses high-level vocabulary and also because this group has more power to cause environmental change than anyone else. She uses analogies when describing things, such as calling the tide a "rhythm" or the "continuing flow" of time. She also uses allusion, when she says "Lilliputan beings swimming through dark pools". I think she achieved her purpose quite well, I really liked the way she described everything. She portrayed the emotions she experienced at these different locations well, and it was really easy to form a mental image of the places and things she was describing, from the tides to the different types of animal life. She uses a lot of descriptive language, such as "for the delicate, destructible, yet incredibly vital force that somehow holds its place amid the harsh realities of the inorganic world". Throughout the essay, she does an excellent job not only describing the things she saw, she also describes the emotions she felt as she was encountering these things, and I think this was an important part of her purpose as well. And if I'm correct in saying that she was looking for people be concerned about the environment, then I think she also achieved this because she described everything in such a way that makes the reader think that places like this are precious and need to preserved.

A location similar to those described throughout the essay.