Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature

Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Chapter One: Toni Morrisons Contribution to American Literature Paradoxically, immortality is not achieved through the defeat of biological death, but rather through the indomitability of the spirit, which leaves behind the fruits of wisdom and humanity, putting forevermore things in a different perspective for generations to come. This, however, is not a smooth and linear process and nor does it leave one untransformed. Referring to the motto above, Toni Morrisons lifelong work has been an accurate reflection of her and her races upheaval. Albeit she fictionalizes her novels to a great extent, her work does not fail to constitute a palindromic iteration of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences felt both directly and vicariously. To be more precise, if we overlook the minute details of her novels, one cannot tell where her fiction ends and her life begins, or vice-versa: they read the same, regardless of whether we â€Å"read† them from fiction to reality or from reality to fiction. This mirror in which Toni Morrison sees herself and w hose projections â€Å"fall† on the surface of our own interpretations and are thusly decoded and re-encoded is not hung there for the purpose of throwing vanity glances; instead she uses it to question the endlessness of possibilities and that of answers to such broad questions as those relating to racism in the U.S. or to an idealistic state of affairs. My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together. (Rustin) Timing is of immediate importance, as Toni Morrison herself points out, especially since her debut novel appeared on the cusp of the civil rights and feminist movement: a time of great transformations and unparalleled historical significance. She times the appearance of The Bluest Eye so well that its impact reverberates strongly into the present. This is no wonder since her writing is not intended to cater for the general masses, nor does it follow the narrow furrows and strictures of fiction writing which are usually implicitly understood. The importance of her work does not only extend along the dimension of aesthetic value: her work is not cathartic in the sense of presenting true beauty loftily idealized; instead she endows her fictional voices with daring, cunning, resolve, resilience; they are often the loud or muffled voices of the surprisingly articulate and heart-rending insane, the latter perversion of mind being perceived in relation with mind-numbing senseless conformity . One may never tell where artistry begins and ends and to what extent her literary offerings will shape future mentalities, but one thing is for sure: her unquenchable thirst for racial justice and her innovative techniques will never cease to challenge our take on things. If only to weave a flimsy mesh of interpretation around Toni Morrisons undeniably invaluable contribution on American literature and beyond, a closer scrutiny of her work would be most auspicious, especially if we proceed along the lines of racial formation, the importance of family and community, identity, conformity, independence, allegiance, displacement and all the binaries therefrom. Racial Formation and Toni Morrisons Literary Manifest Racial formation never has never been and never will be (one could safely imagine) a smooth and linear phenomenon of innocuous application. Not only that, but never has there been a time in American history when race wasnt a troublesome matter, from the initial clash between the early settlers who achieved the â€Å"conquest of paradise† and the native population, through every aspect of affirmative action, to present frictions with and around immigrants and the border (i.e. with Mexico), all still wrapped in the warm blanket of the American covenant. The exodus of people crossing the ocean has always been a defining feature of the rugged American fabric and trouble and tension an inherent aftermath, for as Thomas Sowell puts it:    The peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all human history. Over the years, the massive stream of humanity—45 million people—crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. They came speaking every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion. (qtd. in Girgus 64) Even though noble rank has been outlawed by the very Constitution of the United States, this does not necessarily ensure the homogeneity of multiethnicity. The social tension described by American sociologist Thomas Sowell and quoted by Sam B. Girgus in â€Å"The New Ethnic Novel and the American Idea† is that caused by the conflicting values brought to the American land, together with languages, customs, and, more importantly, creeds and moral values that this veritable Tower of Babel is still finding very difficult to take in and transform into a meld of acceptable conformity. A tendency existed and steeply evolved in the not very long course of American history to assert the superiority of the Aryan waspish faction of the American nation over all other non-Aryan groups. Since the budding nations ideals have always been slightly adumbrated by the skulking presence of slavery, the African-American paradigm of socio-cultural and political struggle has been conferred upon speci al significance and attention. As such, the status of African-Americans has undergone severe and painful shifts, from the moment they were brought to America as slaves, until at least quite recently. These days, the life of African-Americans in the United States is undoubtedly improved, a fact which can easily be proven by the recent election of the first â€Å"black† president in the entire history of this country. Not only at the highest level, but in all walks of life evidence exists of inclusion in the earnest of members of society belonging to the African-American race.   Albeit banned on some level for instance Executive Order 8802 issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned outright discrimination in the case of jobs related to the federal government and defence contractors open discrimination continued throughout the decades, the segregation and gerrymandering trailing for many decades. Several boiling pressures, however, undermined these discriminatory tactics, such as the Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. These and other actions precipitated the adoption of affirmative action, a bomb which exploded in the face of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had to make efforts to redress these social injustices through as some like to call it â€Å"positive† or â€Å"reverse† discrimination, in spite of Martin Luther King Jr.s dream, a veritable gem of rhetoric. His world-famous 1963 I Have a Dream speech is a watershed moment not only for the Civil Rights Movement a cause that i s brilliantly, persuasively and most important, peacefully championed but for every group that during the course of (American) history had been discriminated against. In it he advocates equality and fraternity, the vital prerequisites of coexistence in a sphere so decidedly multiethnic that, as Herman Melville phrases it, â€Å"You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.† (qtd. in Girgus 65). The attitude taken by American people concerning the preference for or against affirmative action is linked to what everyone was educated to believe. The factor that leaves the greatest imprint on our mind is education and the vehicles for achieving this, such as literature, films, and other media, to say nothing of standardized school curricula and society at large. It is the first of these vehicles that will be investigated in what follows, tracing Toni Morrisons efforts as an epitomic endeavour, in order to isolate its influence on our belief system, values and life choices. Significantly, an original national literature was the first mark of Americas declaration of independence from Europes influence and the African-American one the declaration of independence from â€Å"white† hegemony. Benjamin Franklin believed that â€Å"A good example is the best sermon† (qtd. in Marcovitz 55), while Emerson, the father of transcendentalism urged the American people to be self-reliant above all. Though a maverick at heart throughout his entire glorious existence which, while dappled with tragedy, his work has been no less prolific in spite of all his hardships and his originality, humour and unmatched industriousness Mark Twain, The Father of American Literature, has been a most controversial and compliant figure (only in the sense of providing such an inspiring string of examples in the sense of self-reliance) in his time and continues to be so even today. If at first his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was criticized for the language and subject matter by both his contemporaries and later admirers (Ernest Hemingway would provide a notable example) for being trite and vulgar and even excoriated by public libraries such as the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts or New Yorks Brooklyn Public Library, recent controversy has been focused around racial matters. Critics are split between those regarding the portrayal of Jim as disparaging and as a consequence offensive and those who find Jims superstitious behaviour to be an indication of an alternative perception of our bond with nature, or a more powerful connection with our spiritual side, to say nothing of the steep dissonance between the Waspish past and the politically correct present. In Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark, Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is analysed from the perspective of the importance of the Africanist presence, a presence much silenced and only timidly analyzed for decades. Discussed in terms of socio-historic development, the distinction between â€Å"black† and â€Å"white† themed by Twains novel reaches a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Toni Morrisons interpretation. This can be verified by the juxtaposition between Jims utter love for his masters and the â€Å"baroque† (Morrison 57) torture Huck and Tom subject him to. The â€Å"white† line of argumentation is brilliantly outlined in Mark Twains masterpiece and shrewdly detected by Morrison, who finds Jim â€Å"unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate†, which is exactly how the â€Å"others† are perceived. The religious, scientific, political, cultural and societal practices were so fas hioned around the time when Mark Twain lived as to legitimate slavery and abuse. Starting from the assertion that white people around Jim seek forgiveness and supplication veritable keystone concepts in Christian religions which, however, did not extend to everyone, considering the hovering doubt about the existence of the soul of the â€Å"others†, they (i.e. religions through their cloistered leaders) instead providing convenient ways for turning a blind eye on slavery and even extermination on condition that he accept his inferiority. Thus, she argues, only a representative of the African-American race could have been painfully humiliated by children after being presented as a father and an adult, while no one, not even a white convict, could have been submitted to this kind of treatment. Toni Morrisons discourse is by no means vituperative: she does not intend any reversed oppression through her writing, either in Playing in the Dark or in any of her works of fiction. However, her writing is so compelling that when Beloved does not win her the National Book Award, as many as forty-eight African-American authors and critics write to the New York Times claiming her literary prowess, which afterwards earns her the laurels of the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. Her lack of bias is evident when she praises the former President Bill Clinton calling him the â€Å"first black President, since he displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas† (Cooke), while her discursive equanimity can be traced from the way she analyses the Africanist presence in literature and the way it is regarded from the perspective of its relationship to mainstream literature and criticism: Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. (Playing in the Dark 13) While she does not wish to challenge or criticise anyone for their views and choices, Toni Morrison cannot bear to look the other way when the literary Jim Crow era is still so fiercely enforced. That it might be convenient for anyone to ignore any slice of reality or exclude any of the fibres in the fabric of a nation is quite obvious, and while this approach does not impair our intellect, it does however limit our understanding. This selective interpretation of things which leaves Africanist representation in a cone of darkness is especially significant, since it underpins racism and it bolsters its moral justification, especially along the lines of racial formation: a deeply-seated phenomenon which pervades every aspect of life in America and a very hurtful process for those slighted by it. The relevance of racial formation is underscored throughout Toni Morrisons work and, in their extensive study entitled Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s, Michae l Omi and Howard Winant, the two American sociologists who developed racial formation theory, argue that race is an artificial concept, because the bases according to which any particular individual can be labelled as â€Å"white†, â€Å"black†, and so on, may start from certain biological traits, but race transcends these. To illustrate the point, a person of â€Å"mixed blood† is considered from the point of view of North American and then Latin American racial identification whereby the same categorization would have the same individual first â€Å"black† and then unable to â€Å"pass† as â€Å"black†. At the other extreme, Brazilian legislation is willing to accept the assignation of several racial categories to various members of the same family. In addition to being intricate and far-reaching, these considerations help provide grounding for our study of Toni Morrisons work and its impact on American literature and even life in America and also help account for the perception of other races by the early settlers, whose religious and even scientific tenets had to be broached to accommodate these â€Å"new† categories, such as the â€Å"noble savage,† and dispute the very existence of their soul. This blatant dismissal of a persons soul based solely on the abstract and arbitrary consideration of race is an outrage that Toni Morrison starkly exposes in Beloved, about which Susanna Rustin comments the following in â€Å"The Guardian†: It is a novel of unspeakable horrors. But even more than the physical brutality, Morrison confronts us with the irreparable harm done by what Margaret Atwood described in a review as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised, a system that sought to deprive human beings of what it is that makes them human. (Rustin) Sethe, her heroine, learns the truth and is shocked to realise that her masters, whom she is so devoted to, are taught to distinguish between her human and animal characteristics, which means, in other words, that she is but a soulless beast of burden. Thats when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, No, no. Thats not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And dont forget to line them up. I commenced to walk backward, didnt even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. [] Flies settled all over your face, rubbing their hands. My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. I never told Halle or nobody. (Beloved 224) This episode in Sethes existence can never be erased nor her pain alleviated. The suffering she is caused is absolute and boundless. Her feelings of outrage surge like torrents in her brain and she feels utterly discombobulated. This memory will forever haunt her; it will shape her future and her attitude towards life, her behaviour towards her children, and it will serve as a constantly open wound. Whats even more tragic is that this mind-boggling injustice spared no one: men, women, or children. Remembering his own price, down to the cent, that schoolteacher was able to get for him, he wondered what Sethes would have been. What had Baby Suggs been? How much did Halle owe, still, besides his labor? What did Mrs. Garner get for Paul F? More than nine hundred dollars? How much more? Ten dollars? Twenty? Schoolteacher would know. He knew the worth of everything. It accounted for the real sorrow in his voice when he pronounced Sixo unsuitable. (266) Proceeding along these lines of dehumanization, monetary worth is assigned to each individual and that is the extent of ones value when assessed by the slave owner. Reality is raw, harsh, and beyond shocking, but sugar-coating it would not help if we are to learn the truth about racism and racial formation. The accuracy of Toni Morrisons writing in spite of the degree of fictionalization is the keystone of her discourse. It is her head-on confrontation of the underlying reality that lends Toni Morrison her uniqueness and that has earned her in equal measure respect and criticism. Despite the narrative voices that assert their own individuality in Toni Morrisons works, Sam B. Girgus comments on present-day African-American literary discourse, finding it too elaborate, and somewhat digressive to the detriment of thematic concerns such as the daily life, values, sorrows, tragedies, successes, woes, accomplishments, and so forth. He argues his point by referring to African-American writers Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: both Morrison and Gates typify qualities of ethnicity that are common to many of the writers in the literary and cultural renaissance under discussion. They all write in English even when extolling a particular vernacular speech, dialect, or region. They are all extremely sophisticated artists who use the most complex modern and postmodern techniques to convey their highly individualized visions of experience. Although rooted in ethnic communities and concrete historic situations, their works as cultural artifacts and products are nevertheless aspects of complicated technological and bureaucratic systems of cultural and social production that often differ from the language, values, and daily life of the cultures for which they speak. (Girgus 61) This may be so if we for instance pick up Toni Morrisons Pulitzer-awarded novel Beloved where we find passages of stream of consciousness, dialectal dialogue, flashbacks from the past and the conflation of past and present resulting in a destabilized horizon of racial and individual formation. Toni Morrisons formal education may have driven a wedge between herself and the culture she was born into and which she proudly represents, but she still manages to put together an incredible manifesto that reaches deeper truths and meanings with absolute valences. In her novel the three heroines mother and two daughters have overlapping individualities and they represent good and evil in equal measure. Their existences are nonlinear and they run both ways along the temporal axis. This is especially true of Sethe, the mother, whose past still haunts her and impacts greatly her present and future; an impact which extends to her family as well. The state of nonlinearity, conflation, and duality is also found in other novels, such as The Bluest Eye or Sula, in which the heroines manage to become displaced from their status, they are isolated from their respective families and friends, and are forced into pursuing painful valences of individuality. From this point of view, Toni Morrison herself manages to overreach her scope by challenging the perceptions, values, mores, and principles we are ingrained with by society and education. Agnes Suranyi, a contributor to â€Å"The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison†, edited by Justine Tally, expresses just such a view: â€Å"The borderline between decent women and man-eating prostitutes is erased; only the latter are capable of giving love to Pecola, whose quest for it elsewhere is futile.† (16-17). This view is of great significance because it epitomizes Toni Morrisons take on life: nothing in her work is â€Å"fed† to us already masticated; it is quite the c ontrary that occurs: we have to interpret the facts stated, the innuendoes, the streams of consciousness, the multifaceted and split personalities, their actions and inactions all by ourselves, through our own filters and open up to a more thorough interpretation that must override dated tenets.     Ã‚   Applying the above stated, upon perusing Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, one cannot miss the connection between melding and overlapping identities and the life of people struggling with racial formation and being forced into conformity and assimilation. This assertion is further reinforced by the fact that Sethe lived in the time of the Underground Railroad, a time which saw a sharp increase in the severity of punishments for escaping bondage. The tenseness of life on the black / white divide is passed on to later generations who carry on with their incessant frictions all the way to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond. In a 2004 interview with Rachel Cooke for â€Å"The Observer† Toni Morrison successfully proves why the battle with racism is not yet over, in spite of all the things that have changed since the beginning of affirmative action. I dont pass without insults. Let me give you an example. I walk into the Waldorf Astoria in New York to check in. Were going to have a drink, and then my friend is going to go home. She stands behind me, as I check in. Finally, the guy says, Oh, are you registering too? He thought I was the maid. My friend was trembling with anger. It was so personal. But the irony of it was that I was on the cover of a magazine that month, and there were these posters with my face on them all over New York. (qtd. in â€Å"The Observer†) The Bluest Eye her debut novel for instance, has had its popularity delayed many a year precisely because of the stark way in which Toni Morrison approached taboo subjects and because she strived to prove that â€Å"black† did not equal â€Å"ugly†. Growing up is difficult and the girls in the novel find their race assignation which is no fault of theirs a difficult burden to carry around. They do not have the easier lives of the lighter-skinned people in their community and their perceived ugliness is a feature which gradually seeps into their consciousness to such a degree that it becomes overbearing. The validity of this externally-imposed ugliness is reinforced not only by the white members of society, but by the very families themselves. In Pecolas case, her own mother finds her daughter repulsive and troublesome, choosing to love a white child more than her own an unforgivable and heinous deed. But then the destabilization of identity is a practice quite comm on for Toni Morrison, and rightly so, because although identity is formed at an early stage in our existence, the vector of external factors leave multiple indelible marks upon the essence of our character. For Toni Morrisons characters the insurmountable obstacles they have to overcome take too great a toll on their resilience, which ultimately becomes defeated. This reciprocal allegoric relationship between private and collective (in this case racial) identity is a true-to-life representation of many generations of oppressed African-Americans and their struggles to survive in a disparaging mainstream society. In Sula, the African-American writer uses the Bottom as a twofold metaphor: on the one hand the location of this neighbourhood is on top of a hill which, as the slave owner explains to the slave, is the bottom of the world from where God is watching and from which â€Å"the blacks† took â€Å"small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks† (11), while on the other we see little black girls being picked on by the most recent immigrants who themselves would endure abuse, thus continuing this loop which is closed by the proximity to God that the hills afford them. The ramifications do not stop here: it seems that in any place in the novel, any novel of Toni Morrisons, there is a starting point for a new insight, for a new interpretation, for a kernel of postmodernist truth about life and literature, for novel literary technique and what it entails for both the novel itself as a genre, as well as for the reader and his/her perception of things thats constantly being challenged, just like the readers matrix of social tenets and belief system. Possibly the best example of this is served by the story which inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved, the story of the African-American woman who would rather kill her own daughter than suffer to have her returned to bondage. As Nellie Y. McKay, the co-editor alongside William L. Andrews of â€Å"Toni Morrisons Beloved A Casebook† states another critics point of view (i.e. Karla F. C. Holloway, writer of â€Å"Beloved: A Spiritual†), Toni Morrison really manages to come up with a fresh and reinvigorating approach   For example, with myth as a dominant feature of Beloved, Morrison not only reclaims the Garner story from those who interviewed her after her childs death and expressed enormous surprise at her calm but also, as mythmaker, achieves a complete revision of the episode. [] The oral and written history that Morrison revises, consciously and unconsciously felt, considers many aspects of each life and reflects an alternative perspective on reality. [] In addition, Morrison, like many other African and African-American writers, often defies the boundaries separating past, present, and future time. This allows her to free Beloved from the dominance of a history that would deny the merits of slave stories. As Morrisons creation, Beloved is not only Sethes dead child but the faces of all those lost in slavery, carrying in her the history of the sixty million and more. Holloway sees Beloved as a novel of inner vision: the reclamation of black spiritual histories. (15) As Morrison herself points out in the novel, the press has no interest in presenting the truth detachedly. It also does not concern itself with such â€Å"trite† topics as the abominable abuses of slavery and it does not give praise where praise is due. Instead, it engages in shameless hectoring of a mother who kills her own daughter. If taken out of context, we would expect it to do no less and, but for Toni Morrisons reframing and revamping of the story, we probably wouldnt have given the story a second thought. But we cannot be left to stand idle before such brazen hypocrisy as regarding Sethe more animal than human, and then a murderess guilty of a heinously premeditated act done whilst in full possession of her faculties. Furthermore, her case is stripped of context, just as the plethora of various other deeds similarly perpetrated as a result of extraordinary duress. This time around Morrison gives ample space to her heroine to justify her actions, while not allowing her , however, to be absolved of the guilt she must bear until the end, hence the muddled border between temporal references, actions, characters, and individualities, which again escape their expected linearity and contiguity. Perception is a fickle thing, especially when something is stretched, filtered, re-filtered, decoded and re-encoded, challenged and stereotyped and warped in every way imaginable. We cannot assert our identity as long as we are unable to find the appropriate compromise between the adoption and rejection of every aspect that is debatable and that can be transacted over this social Carrefour of exchanges. But, more importantly, we can no longer acquiesce in this moral comfort zone set out by society, which overshadows whole groups based on artificial considerations, especially when the relativism of the preceding adjective becomes too overbearing and too painful to stand. The point being made here is that while maybe artificial in essence, the segregation inflicted on these groups and others, as well (while Toni Morrison is clearly concerned with the African-American case, it cannot fail to be propitious to generalise an assertion that we should internalise already if we havent done so and apply to any case in which double standards might occur) is absorbed by those whose mental health is abused incessantly and whose resilience truly worn out and even suppressed. What Toni Morrison attempts is to sow the seeds of individual and discernible thought willing and capable enough to probe things deeper than the shallowness of their outward appearance. Toni Morrisons works are soul-wrench ing panegyrics dedicated to the memory of the former slaves and her contemporaries who were still enslaved through omission and discrimination, as well as a testimony of the noblest and most dedicated application of ones moral ideals. Chapter Two: The Importance of Family and Community in Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (nobelprize.org) It is no secret or surprise that, first family and then family and community, have the greatest impact on our personality, shaping and reshaping our existence, validating and supporting our preferences and choices or going to great lengths to lay stumbling blocks in our path towards achieving these. Furthermore, the conceptions and principles professed within familial confines are based on the patterned behaviour of ones surrounding environment. This, in turn is founded on what is deemed just and acceptable behaviour leading to harmony and cooperation and is related to civic duty. According to Freuds structural model of the psyche, the development of the human psyche is a three-stage process which corresponds to the three most important stages in our existence. In the first stage, the id, our psyche is so shaped as to want nothing but to fulfil its own needs and wishes, regardless of those of everyone else. Then, as we start learning to distinguish betwee Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Toni Morrisons Contributions to American Literature Chapter One: Toni Morrisons Contribution to American Literature Paradoxically, immortality is not achieved through the defeat of biological death, but rather through the indomitability of the spirit, which leaves behind the fruits of wisdom and humanity, putting forevermore things in a different perspective for generations to come. This, however, is not a smooth and linear process and nor does it leave one untransformed. Referring to the motto above, Toni Morrisons lifelong work has been an accurate reflection of her and her races upheaval. Albeit she fictionalizes her novels to a great extent, her work does not fail to constitute a palindromic iteration of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences felt both directly and vicariously. To be more precise, if we overlook the minute details of her novels, one cannot tell where her fiction ends and her life begins, or vice-versa: they read the same, regardless of whether we â€Å"read† them from fiction to reality or from reality to fiction. This mirror in which Toni Morrison sees herself and w hose projections â€Å"fall† on the surface of our own interpretations and are thusly decoded and re-encoded is not hung there for the purpose of throwing vanity glances; instead she uses it to question the endlessness of possibilities and that of answers to such broad questions as those relating to racism in the U.S. or to an idealistic state of affairs. My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together. (Rustin) Timing is of immediate importance, as Toni Morrison herself points out, especially since her debut novel appeared on the cusp of the civil rights and feminist movement: a time of great transformations and unparalleled historical significance. She times the appearance of The Bluest Eye so well that its impact reverberates strongly into the present. This is no wonder since her writing is not intended to cater for the general masses, nor does it follow the narrow furrows and strictures of fiction writing which are usually implicitly understood. The importance of her work does not only extend along the dimension of aesthetic value: her work is not cathartic in the sense of presenting true beauty loftily idealized; instead she endows her fictional voices with daring, cunning, resolve, resilience; they are often the loud or muffled voices of the surprisingly articulate and heart-rending insane, the latter perversion of mind being perceived in relation with mind-numbing senseless conformity . One may never tell where artistry begins and ends and to what extent her literary offerings will shape future mentalities, but one thing is for sure: her unquenchable thirst for racial justice and her innovative techniques will never cease to challenge our take on things. If only to weave a flimsy mesh of interpretation around Toni Morrisons undeniably invaluable contribution on American literature and beyond, a closer scrutiny of her work would be most auspicious, especially if we proceed along the lines of racial formation, the importance of family and community, identity, conformity, independence, allegiance, displacement and all the binaries therefrom. Racial Formation and Toni Morrisons Literary Manifest Racial formation never has never been and never will be (one could safely imagine) a smooth and linear phenomenon of innocuous application. Not only that, but never has there been a time in American history when race wasnt a troublesome matter, from the initial clash between the early settlers who achieved the â€Å"conquest of paradise† and the native population, through every aspect of affirmative action, to present frictions with and around immigrants and the border (i.e. with Mexico), all still wrapped in the warm blanket of the American covenant. The exodus of people crossing the ocean has always been a defining feature of the rugged American fabric and trouble and tension an inherent aftermath, for as Thomas Sowell puts it:    The peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all human history. Over the years, the massive stream of humanity—45 million people—crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States. They came speaking every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion. (qtd. in Girgus 64) Even though noble rank has been outlawed by the very Constitution of the United States, this does not necessarily ensure the homogeneity of multiethnicity. The social tension described by American sociologist Thomas Sowell and quoted by Sam B. Girgus in â€Å"The New Ethnic Novel and the American Idea† is that caused by the conflicting values brought to the American land, together with languages, customs, and, more importantly, creeds and moral values that this veritable Tower of Babel is still finding very difficult to take in and transform into a meld of acceptable conformity. A tendency existed and steeply evolved in the not very long course of American history to assert the superiority of the Aryan waspish faction of the American nation over all other non-Aryan groups. Since the budding nations ideals have always been slightly adumbrated by the skulking presence of slavery, the African-American paradigm of socio-cultural and political struggle has been conferred upon speci al significance and attention. As such, the status of African-Americans has undergone severe and painful shifts, from the moment they were brought to America as slaves, until at least quite recently. These days, the life of African-Americans in the United States is undoubtedly improved, a fact which can easily be proven by the recent election of the first â€Å"black† president in the entire history of this country. Not only at the highest level, but in all walks of life evidence exists of inclusion in the earnest of members of society belonging to the African-American race.   Albeit banned on some level for instance Executive Order 8802 issued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt banned outright discrimination in the case of jobs related to the federal government and defence contractors open discrimination continued throughout the decades, the segregation and gerrymandering trailing for many decades. Several boiling pressures, however, undermined these discriminatory tactics, such as the Brown vs. Board of Education of 1954 or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. These and other actions precipitated the adoption of affirmative action, a bomb which exploded in the face of Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who had to make efforts to redress these social injustices through as some like to call it â€Å"positive† or â€Å"reverse† discrimination, in spite of Martin Luther King Jr.s dream, a veritable gem of rhetoric. His world-famous 1963 I Have a Dream speech is a watershed moment not only for the Civil Rights Movement a cause that i s brilliantly, persuasively and most important, peacefully championed but for every group that during the course of (American) history had been discriminated against. In it he advocates equality and fraternity, the vital prerequisites of coexistence in a sphere so decidedly multiethnic that, as Herman Melville phrases it, â€Å"You can not spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world.† (qtd. in Girgus 65). The attitude taken by American people concerning the preference for or against affirmative action is linked to what everyone was educated to believe. The factor that leaves the greatest imprint on our mind is education and the vehicles for achieving this, such as literature, films, and other media, to say nothing of standardized school curricula and society at large. It is the first of these vehicles that will be investigated in what follows, tracing Toni Morrisons efforts as an epitomic endeavour, in order to isolate its influence on our belief system, values and life choices. Significantly, an original national literature was the first mark of Americas declaration of independence from Europes influence and the African-American one the declaration of independence from â€Å"white† hegemony. Benjamin Franklin believed that â€Å"A good example is the best sermon† (qtd. in Marcovitz 55), while Emerson, the father of transcendentalism urged the American people to be self-reliant above all. Though a maverick at heart throughout his entire glorious existence which, while dappled with tragedy, his work has been no less prolific in spite of all his hardships and his originality, humour and unmatched industriousness Mark Twain, The Father of American Literature, has been a most controversial and compliant figure (only in the sense of providing such an inspiring string of examples in the sense of self-reliance) in his time and continues to be so even today. If at first his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was criticized for the language and subject matter by both his contemporaries and later admirers (Ernest Hemingway would provide a notable example) for being trite and vulgar and even excoriated by public libraries such as the Concord Public Library in Massachusetts or New Yorks Brooklyn Public Library, recent controversy has been focused around racial matters. Critics are split between those regarding the portrayal of Jim as disparaging and as a consequence offensive and those who find Jims superstitious behaviour to be an indication of an alternative perception of our bond with nature, or a more powerful connection with our spiritual side, to say nothing of the steep dissonance between the Waspish past and the politically correct present. In Toni Morrisons Playing in the Dark, Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is analysed from the perspective of the importance of the Africanist presence, a presence much silenced and only timidly analyzed for decades. Discussed in terms of socio-historic development, the distinction between â€Å"black† and â€Å"white† themed by Twains novel reaches a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, as evidenced in Toni Morrisons interpretation. This can be verified by the juxtaposition between Jims utter love for his masters and the â€Å"baroque† (Morrison 57) torture Huck and Tom subject him to. The â€Å"white† line of argumentation is brilliantly outlined in Mark Twains masterpiece and shrewdly detected by Morrison, who finds Jim â€Å"unassertive, loving, irrational, passionate, dependent, inarticulate†, which is exactly how the â€Å"others† are perceived. The religious, scientific, political, cultural and societal practices were so fas hioned around the time when Mark Twain lived as to legitimate slavery and abuse. Starting from the assertion that white people around Jim seek forgiveness and supplication veritable keystone concepts in Christian religions which, however, did not extend to everyone, considering the hovering doubt about the existence of the soul of the â€Å"others†, they (i.e. religions through their cloistered leaders) instead providing convenient ways for turning a blind eye on slavery and even extermination on condition that he accept his inferiority. Thus, she argues, only a representative of the African-American race could have been painfully humiliated by children after being presented as a father and an adult, while no one, not even a white convict, could have been submitted to this kind of treatment. Toni Morrisons discourse is by no means vituperative: she does not intend any reversed oppression through her writing, either in Playing in the Dark or in any of her works of fiction. However, her writing is so compelling that when Beloved does not win her the National Book Award, as many as forty-eight African-American authors and critics write to the New York Times claiming her literary prowess, which afterwards earns her the laurels of the Pulitzer Prize, and rightly so. Her lack of bias is evident when she praises the former President Bill Clinton calling him the â€Å"first black President, since he displayed almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonalds-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas† (Cooke), while her discursive equanimity can be traced from the way she analyses the Africanist presence in literature and the way it is regarded from the perspective of its relationship to mainstream literature and criticism: Like thousands of avid but nonacademic readers, some powerful literary critics in the United States have never read, and are proud to say so, any African-American text. It seems to have done them no harm, presented them with no discernible limitations in the scope of their work or influence. I suspect, with much evidence to support the suspicion, that they will continue to flourish without any knowledge whatsoever of African-American literature. (Playing in the Dark 13) While she does not wish to challenge or criticise anyone for their views and choices, Toni Morrison cannot bear to look the other way when the literary Jim Crow era is still so fiercely enforced. That it might be convenient for anyone to ignore any slice of reality or exclude any of the fibres in the fabric of a nation is quite obvious, and while this approach does not impair our intellect, it does however limit our understanding. This selective interpretation of things which leaves Africanist representation in a cone of darkness is especially significant, since it underpins racism and it bolsters its moral justification, especially along the lines of racial formation: a deeply-seated phenomenon which pervades every aspect of life in America and a very hurtful process for those slighted by it. The relevance of racial formation is underscored throughout Toni Morrisons work and, in their extensive study entitled Racial Formation in the United States: from the 1960s to the 1990s, Michae l Omi and Howard Winant, the two American sociologists who developed racial formation theory, argue that race is an artificial concept, because the bases according to which any particular individual can be labelled as â€Å"white†, â€Å"black†, and so on, may start from certain biological traits, but race transcends these. To illustrate the point, a person of â€Å"mixed blood† is considered from the point of view of North American and then Latin American racial identification whereby the same categorization would have the same individual first â€Å"black† and then unable to â€Å"pass† as â€Å"black†. At the other extreme, Brazilian legislation is willing to accept the assignation of several racial categories to various members of the same family. In addition to being intricate and far-reaching, these considerations help provide grounding for our study of Toni Morrisons work and its impact on American literature and even life in America and also help account for the perception of other races by the early settlers, whose religious and even scientific tenets had to be broached to accommodate these â€Å"new† categories, such as the â€Å"noble savage,† and dispute the very existence of their soul. This blatant dismissal of a persons soul based solely on the abstract and arbitrary consideration of race is an outrage that Toni Morrison starkly exposes in Beloved, about which Susanna Rustin comments the following in â€Å"The Guardian†: It is a novel of unspeakable horrors. But even more than the physical brutality, Morrison confronts us with the irreparable harm done by what Margaret Atwood described in a review as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised, a system that sought to deprive human beings of what it is that makes them human. (Rustin) Sethe, her heroine, learns the truth and is shocked to realise that her masters, whom she is so devoted to, are taught to distinguish between her human and animal characteristics, which means, in other words, that she is but a soulless beast of burden. Thats when I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, No, no. Thats not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And dont forget to line them up. I commenced to walk backward, didnt even look behind me to find out where I was headed. I just kept lifting my feet and pushing back. When I bumped up against a tree my scalp was prickly. [] Flies settled all over your face, rubbing their hands. My head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp. I never told Halle or nobody. (Beloved 224) This episode in Sethes existence can never be erased nor her pain alleviated. The suffering she is caused is absolute and boundless. Her feelings of outrage surge like torrents in her brain and she feels utterly discombobulated. This memory will forever haunt her; it will shape her future and her attitude towards life, her behaviour towards her children, and it will serve as a constantly open wound. Whats even more tragic is that this mind-boggling injustice spared no one: men, women, or children. Remembering his own price, down to the cent, that schoolteacher was able to get for him, he wondered what Sethes would have been. What had Baby Suggs been? How much did Halle owe, still, besides his labor? What did Mrs. Garner get for Paul F? More than nine hundred dollars? How much more? Ten dollars? Twenty? Schoolteacher would know. He knew the worth of everything. It accounted for the real sorrow in his voice when he pronounced Sixo unsuitable. (266) Proceeding along these lines of dehumanization, monetary worth is assigned to each individual and that is the extent of ones value when assessed by the slave owner. Reality is raw, harsh, and beyond shocking, but sugar-coating it would not help if we are to learn the truth about racism and racial formation. The accuracy of Toni Morrisons writing in spite of the degree of fictionalization is the keystone of her discourse. It is her head-on confrontation of the underlying reality that lends Toni Morrison her uniqueness and that has earned her in equal measure respect and criticism. Despite the narrative voices that assert their own individuality in Toni Morrisons works, Sam B. Girgus comments on present-day African-American literary discourse, finding it too elaborate, and somewhat digressive to the detriment of thematic concerns such as the daily life, values, sorrows, tragedies, successes, woes, accomplishments, and so forth. He argues his point by referring to African-American writers Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: both Morrison and Gates typify qualities of ethnicity that are common to many of the writers in the literary and cultural renaissance under discussion. They all write in English even when extolling a particular vernacular speech, dialect, or region. They are all extremely sophisticated artists who use the most complex modern and postmodern techniques to convey their highly individualized visions of experience. Although rooted in ethnic communities and concrete historic situations, their works as cultural artifacts and products are nevertheless aspects of complicated technological and bureaucratic systems of cultural and social production that often differ from the language, values, and daily life of the cultures for which they speak. (Girgus 61) This may be so if we for instance pick up Toni Morrisons Pulitzer-awarded novel Beloved where we find passages of stream of consciousness, dialectal dialogue, flashbacks from the past and the conflation of past and present resulting in a destabilized horizon of racial and individual formation. Toni Morrisons formal education may have driven a wedge between herself and the culture she was born into and which she proudly represents, but she still manages to put together an incredible manifesto that reaches deeper truths and meanings with absolute valences. In her novel the three heroines mother and two daughters have overlapping individualities and they represent good and evil in equal measure. Their existences are nonlinear and they run both ways along the temporal axis. This is especially true of Sethe, the mother, whose past still haunts her and impacts greatly her present and future; an impact which extends to her family as well. The state of nonlinearity, conflation, and duality is also found in other novels, such as The Bluest Eye or Sula, in which the heroines manage to become displaced from their status, they are isolated from their respective families and friends, and are forced into pursuing painful valences of individuality. From this point of view, Toni Morrison herself manages to overreach her scope by challenging the perceptions, values, mores, and principles we are ingrained with by society and education. Agnes Suranyi, a contributor to â€Å"The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison†, edited by Justine Tally, expresses just such a view: â€Å"The borderline between decent women and man-eating prostitutes is erased; only the latter are capable of giving love to Pecola, whose quest for it elsewhere is futile.† (16-17). This view is of great significance because it epitomizes Toni Morrisons take on life: nothing in her work is â€Å"fed† to us already masticated; it is quite the c ontrary that occurs: we have to interpret the facts stated, the innuendoes, the streams of consciousness, the multifaceted and split personalities, their actions and inactions all by ourselves, through our own filters and open up to a more thorough interpretation that must override dated tenets.     Ã‚   Applying the above stated, upon perusing Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, one cannot miss the connection between melding and overlapping identities and the life of people struggling with racial formation and being forced into conformity and assimilation. This assertion is further reinforced by the fact that Sethe lived in the time of the Underground Railroad, a time which saw a sharp increase in the severity of punishments for escaping bondage. The tenseness of life on the black / white divide is passed on to later generations who carry on with their incessant frictions all the way to Martin Luther King Jr. and beyond. In a 2004 interview with Rachel Cooke for â€Å"The Observer† Toni Morrison successfully proves why the battle with racism is not yet over, in spite of all the things that have changed since the beginning of affirmative action. I dont pass without insults. Let me give you an example. I walk into the Waldorf Astoria in New York to check in. Were going to have a drink, and then my friend is going to go home. She stands behind me, as I check in. Finally, the guy says, Oh, are you registering too? He thought I was the maid. My friend was trembling with anger. It was so personal. But the irony of it was that I was on the cover of a magazine that month, and there were these posters with my face on them all over New York. (qtd. in â€Å"The Observer†) The Bluest Eye her debut novel for instance, has had its popularity delayed many a year precisely because of the stark way in which Toni Morrison approached taboo subjects and because she strived to prove that â€Å"black† did not equal â€Å"ugly†. Growing up is difficult and the girls in the novel find their race assignation which is no fault of theirs a difficult burden to carry around. They do not have the easier lives of the lighter-skinned people in their community and their perceived ugliness is a feature which gradually seeps into their consciousness to such a degree that it becomes overbearing. The validity of this externally-imposed ugliness is reinforced not only by the white members of society, but by the very families themselves. In Pecolas case, her own mother finds her daughter repulsive and troublesome, choosing to love a white child more than her own an unforgivable and heinous deed. But then the destabilization of identity is a practice quite comm on for Toni Morrison, and rightly so, because although identity is formed at an early stage in our existence, the vector of external factors leave multiple indelible marks upon the essence of our character. For Toni Morrisons characters the insurmountable obstacles they have to overcome take too great a toll on their resilience, which ultimately becomes defeated. This reciprocal allegoric relationship between private and collective (in this case racial) identity is a true-to-life representation of many generations of oppressed African-Americans and their struggles to survive in a disparaging mainstream society. In Sula, the African-American writer uses the Bottom as a twofold metaphor: on the one hand the location of this neighbourhood is on top of a hill which, as the slave owner explains to the slave, is the bottom of the world from where God is watching and from which â€Å"the blacks† took â€Å"small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks† (11), while on the other we see little black girls being picked on by the most recent immigrants who themselves would endure abuse, thus continuing this loop which is closed by the proximity to God that the hills afford them. The ramifications do not stop here: it seems that in any place in the novel, any novel of Toni Morrisons, there is a starting point for a new insight, for a new interpretation, for a kernel of postmodernist truth about life and literature, for novel literary technique and what it entails for both the novel itself as a genre, as well as for the reader and his/her perception of things thats constantly being challenged, just like the readers matrix of social tenets and belief system. Possibly the best example of this is served by the story which inspired Toni Morrison to write Beloved, the story of the African-American woman who would rather kill her own daughter than suffer to have her returned to bondage. As Nellie Y. McKay, the co-editor alongside William L. Andrews of â€Å"Toni Morrisons Beloved A Casebook† states another critics point of view (i.e. Karla F. C. Holloway, writer of â€Å"Beloved: A Spiritual†), Toni Morrison really manages to come up with a fresh and reinvigorating approach   For example, with myth as a dominant feature of Beloved, Morrison not only reclaims the Garner story from those who interviewed her after her childs death and expressed enormous surprise at her calm but also, as mythmaker, achieves a complete revision of the episode. [] The oral and written history that Morrison revises, consciously and unconsciously felt, considers many aspects of each life and reflects an alternative perspective on reality. [] In addition, Morrison, like many other African and African-American writers, often defies the boundaries separating past, present, and future time. This allows her to free Beloved from the dominance of a history that would deny the merits of slave stories. As Morrisons creation, Beloved is not only Sethes dead child but the faces of all those lost in slavery, carrying in her the history of the sixty million and more. Holloway sees Beloved as a novel of inner vision: the reclamation of black spiritual histories. (15) As Morrison herself points out in the novel, the press has no interest in presenting the truth detachedly. It also does not concern itself with such â€Å"trite† topics as the abominable abuses of slavery and it does not give praise where praise is due. Instead, it engages in shameless hectoring of a mother who kills her own daughter. If taken out of context, we would expect it to do no less and, but for Toni Morrisons reframing and revamping of the story, we probably wouldnt have given the story a second thought. But we cannot be left to stand idle before such brazen hypocrisy as regarding Sethe more animal than human, and then a murderess guilty of a heinously premeditated act done whilst in full possession of her faculties. Furthermore, her case is stripped of context, just as the plethora of various other deeds similarly perpetrated as a result of extraordinary duress. This time around Morrison gives ample space to her heroine to justify her actions, while not allowing her , however, to be absolved of the guilt she must bear until the end, hence the muddled border between temporal references, actions, characters, and individualities, which again escape their expected linearity and contiguity. Perception is a fickle thing, especially when something is stretched, filtered, re-filtered, decoded and re-encoded, challenged and stereotyped and warped in every way imaginable. We cannot assert our identity as long as we are unable to find the appropriate compromise between the adoption and rejection of every aspect that is debatable and that can be transacted over this social Carrefour of exchanges. But, more importantly, we can no longer acquiesce in this moral comfort zone set out by society, which overshadows whole groups based on artificial considerations, especially when the relativism of the preceding adjective becomes too overbearing and too painful to stand. The point being made here is that while maybe artificial in essence, the segregation inflicted on these groups and others, as well (while Toni Morrison is clearly concerned with the African-American case, it cannot fail to be propitious to generalise an assertion that we should internalise already if we havent done so and apply to any case in which double standards might occur) is absorbed by those whose mental health is abused incessantly and whose resilience truly worn out and even suppressed. What Toni Morrison attempts is to sow the seeds of individual and discernible thought willing and capable enough to probe things deeper than the shallowness of their outward appearance. Toni Morrisons works are soul-wrench ing panegyrics dedicated to the memory of the former slaves and her contemporaries who were still enslaved through omission and discrimination, as well as a testimony of the noblest and most dedicated application of ones moral ideals. Chapter Two: The Importance of Family and Community in Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (nobelprize.org) It is no secret or surprise that, first family and then family and community, have the greatest impact on our personality, shaping and reshaping our existence, validating and supporting our preferences and choices or going to great lengths to lay stumbling blocks in our path towards achieving these. Furthermore, the conceptions and principles professed within familial confines are based on the patterned behaviour of ones surrounding environment. This, in turn is founded on what is deemed just and acceptable behaviour leading to harmony and cooperation and is related to civic duty. According to Freuds structural model of the psyche, the development of the human psyche is a three-stage process which corresponds to the three most important stages in our existence. In the first stage, the id, our psyche is so shaped as to want nothing but to fulfil its own needs and wishes, regardless of those of everyone else. Then, as we start learning to distinguish betwee

Developmental Psychology Journal Articles Essay -- Papers

Developmental Psychology Journal Articles The five journal articles I examined were all from a journal titled Developmental Psychology, May 2000. The first journal article that I observed was "Sleep Patterns and Sleep Disruptions in School-Aged Children." This study assessed the sleep patterns, sleep disruptions, and sleepiness of school-age children. Sleep patterns of 140 children (72 boys and 68 girls; 2nd-, 4th-, and 6th-grade students) were evaluated with activity monitors (actigraphs). In addition, the children and their parents completed complementary sleep questionnaires and daily reports. The findings reflected significant age differences, indicating that older children have more delayed sleep onset times and increased reported daytime sleepiness. Girls were found to spend more time in sleep and to have an increased percentage of motionless sleep. Fragmented sleep was found in 18% of the children. No age differences were found in any of the sleep quality measures. Scores on objective sleep measures were associated with subjective reports of sleepiness. Family stress, parental age, and parental education were related to the child's sleep-wake measures. The next article I observed was "Shared Caregiving: Comparisons Between Home and Child-Care Settings." The experiences of 84 German toddlers (12-24 months old) who were either enrolled or not enrolled in child care were described with observational checklists from the time they woke up until they went to bed. The total amount of care experienced over the course of a weekday by 35 pairs of toddlers (1 member of each pair in child care, 1 member not) did not differ according to whether the toddlers spent time in child care. Although the child... ...h their mothers and their fathers on separate occasions in their families' homes. Parent-child pairs played for 8 minutes each with a feminine-stereotyped toy set (foods and plates) and a masculine-stereotyped toy set (track and cars). Levels of affiliation (engaging vs. distancing) and assertion (direct vs. non-direct) were rated on 7-point scales every 5 seconds from the videotapes for both parent and child. Overall, the play activity accounted for a large proportion of the variance in parents' and children's mean affiliation and assertion ratings. Some hypothesized gender-related differences in behavior were also observed. In addition, exploratory analyses revealed some differences between the different ethnic groups. The results highlight the importance of role modeling and activity settings in the socialization and social construction of gender.

Lottery Addiction: Its Effects on the Respondents’ Economic Status in Nasugbu, Batangas

LOTTERY ADDICTION: ITS EFFECTS ON THE RESPONDENTS’ ECONOMIC STATUS IN NASUGBU, BATANGAS A Research Paper Presented to MR. JOSEPH B. EVANGELISTA Nasugbu Christian Faith Academy, Inc. In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements as Secondary Graduates by Sibelle Justine L. Gallivo Richard Jason R. Dastas Angelica B. Magpantay Ronnel Aries B. Ilao Mark Bryan A. Urena Regine N. Antazo Alfred C. Drio March 2010  ©2010 Sibelle Justine L. Gallivo Richard Jason R. Dastas Angelica B. Magpantay Ronnel Aries B. Ilao Mark Bryan A. Urena Regine N. Antazo Alfred C. DrioAll Rights Reserve ABSTRACT Title:Lottery Addiction: Its Effect on the Respondents’ Economic Status in Nasugbu, Batangas 2. Researchers :Sibelle Justine L. Gallivo Alfred C. Drio Angelica B. Magpantay Mark Bryan A. Urena Regine N. Antazo Richard Jason R. Dastas Ronnel Aries B. Ilao 3. Publication 3. 1Date: 3. 2Place: 3. 3Region: IV-A CALABARZON 4. Institution 4. 1Name: Nasugbu Christian Faith Academy, Inc. 4. 2School Y ear: 2009-2010 5. Statement of the Problem 1. Personal profile of the respondents in terms of: 1. 1 sex 1. 2 civil status 1. 3 salary range 2.What are the effects of lottery to the economic status of the respondents? 3. What is the relationship of the respondents; bet to their employment status? 4. Who usually give the biggest bet: employed or unemployed? 5. Who usually play lotto: employed or unemployed? 6. What are the advantages and disadvantages of playing lotto? 6. Summary of Findings Profile of Respondents With the total of fifteen (15) respondents, nine (9) or 60% were female while six (6) were males eleven (11) or 73. 3% were married while four (4) or 26. 7% were single by civil status; eight (8) or 53. % of the respondents falls on salary bracket of Php 1,500 t0 5,000, four (4) or 26. 7% with no salary , two (2) or 13. 3% range a salary from Php 10,000 to 20,000 while a salary range of Php. 30,000 and above has one (1) or 6. 7%. Effects of Lottery to the Respondent’s Economic Status Most of the enumerated effects listed by the respondents were affects the budget of the family resulting to the increase of allotted budget; affects the family relationship due to additional burden brought by playing lotto; intentional use of budget allotted to the children’s needs, and; highly emphasized fall of economic status.Relationship of Respondents bet to their Employment Status Employed versus unemployed status of the respondents established outstanding relationship with their bet. Eleven (11) or 73. 3% were employed thus give there usual or bigger bet compared to four (4) or 26. 6% unemployed. Usual Lotto players between employed and unemployed Employed respondents were the major lotto player since they have the means to gamble as compared to unemployed respondents. Advantages and Disadvantages Most of the respondents believed that playing lotto can only give hope of becoming rich through winning the jackpot prize.Most likely playing lotto was disad vantages: fall of their economic status; family budget/allocation suffered; unwise use of the money; becoming unproductive citizen; lead to addiction thus committing unacceptable actions due to gambling 7. Conclusions 1. Since majority of the respondents were married and female, they invest their future through playing lotto hoping to win the jackpot prize. 2. Since most of the respondents were employed, they have the high tendency of playing lotto because of their source of money as well as the tendency to put the biggest bet. . Since the respondents feels the negative effects of playing lotto in their economic status they would probably limit or refrained from playing lotto. 4. Since lotto playing was disadvantageous, the respondents surely realized its implication to their family as well as to the community. 8. Recommendations 1. Instead of investing family’s future through the chance of luck, find a real and long-term job that will secure your future, better to gain the v alue of worth rather than relying on your chance. 2.Lotto fanatics should not rely much on winning since it is computer operated this east to manipulate. 3. Employed lotto players should not give their biggest bet although they gave the means or source to gamble. 4. Male use/spend family’s budget wisely instead of gambling in lotto. 5. Local Authorities should impose law governing the age allowed to bet in lotto since it is a form of gambling. 6. Avoid becoming addicted in playing lotto since it is disadvantages in nature. 7. Further study about this interesting topic for future preference. APPROVAL SHEETThis research paper entitled, â€Å"LOTTERY ADDICTION: ITS EFFECTS ON THE RESPONDENTS’ ECONOMIC STATUS IN NASUGBU, BATANGAS†, prepared and submitted by Sibelle Justine L. Gallivo, Richard Jason R. Dastas, Angelica B. Magpantay, Ronnel Aries B. Ilao, Mark Bryan A. Urena, Regine N. Antazo, and Alfred C. Drio in partial fulfilment of the requirements as Secondary G raduating Students, has been examined and approved by our Research Teacher, MR. JOSEPH B. EVANGELISTA, with a grade of _____________. Accepted and approved, _____________________ Mr. Joseph B. Evangelista ACKNOWLEDGMENTThe researchers sincerely acknowledge their debt of gratitude to those in one way or another contributed and gave assistance to the preparation and completion of this study. Mr. Joseph B. Evangelista, for providing original ideas and opinions which made the completion of this study possible. Our Parents, who gave us financial aid and supported us morally that serves as our strength. The Borja Family, who helped us in distributing our questionnaires. Our Relatives and Friends, who shared their wisdom, time and effort as well as their suggestions valuable to our study.Our Alma Mater, Nasugbu Christian Faith Academy, Inc. , for the support, knowledge and for molding us to become productive and inytellectual students capable of competing in all aspect. To our Respondents, for their time, effort and invaluable assistance in answering the questionnaires that serves as our main source of informations. And above all, to Our Almighty Creator, for gracing us strength, wisdom and holy guidance as we accomplish all these things. A. B. M. A. C. D. M. A. U. R. N. A. R. R. D. R. B. I. S. L. G. DEDICATION To our beloved parents: Mr. and Mrs. Regino Antazo Mr. nd Mrs. Joseph Dastas Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Drio Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Gallivo Mr. and Mrs. Antonio Ilao Mr. and Mrs. Noeh Magpantay Mr. and Mrs. Lourdeliza Urena To our brothers and sisters: Angelo Magpantay Christopher Drio Jr. Jerome Dastas Rose Marie Eliza Raizza Mae Dastas Ray Anthony Ilao Reynaldo Antazo Resty Antazo Richel Antazo Rose Marie Eliza Antaso Ruby Antazo Ruel Antazo Ruiter Allan Ilao This piece of work is humbly dedicated. The Researchers TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Title pagei Copyright Pageii Abstractiii Approval Sheetvi Acknowledgementvii Dedicationviii Chapter I.THE PROBLEM AND ITS B ACKGROUND Introduction1 Statement of the Problem3 Statement of the Hypothesis3 Assumptions3 Significance of the Study4 Scope and Limitation of the Study4 Definition of Terms4 II. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURES AND STUDIES Foreign Literature6 Local Literature6 Foreign Studies12 Local Studies15 III. METHODS OF RESEARCH AND PROCEDURE Design and Method of Research19 Sample and Sampling Techniques Used19 Statistical Treatment of Data21 IV. PRESENTATION, ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF DATA Sub-problem 1. What is the profile the respondent’s terms of: 1. sex 2. civil status 3. alary range22 Sub-problem 2. What are the effects of lottery to the economic status of the respondents? 22 Sub-problem 3. What is the relationship of the respondents bet to their employment status? 22 Sub-problem 4. Who usually give the biggest bet: employed or unemployed? 23 Sub-problem 5. Who usually play lotto: employed or unemployed? 23 Sub-problem 6. What are the advantages and disadvantages of playing lot to? 23 V. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS, CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Summary 25 Findings25 Conclusions26 Recommandations27 BIBLIOGRAPHY28 APPENDICE A. Questionnaires CURRICULUM VITAE29

Was Paul McCartney and Nancy Shevells Wedding Vegan

When musician and animal advocate Paul McCartney married American businesswoman Nancy Shevell on October 9, 2011 in London, animal activists wondered if the wedding was vegetarian. Maybe even vegan? Short answer: The wedding was vegetarian, and parts were vegan. The former Beatle is a long-time vegetarian, and has been a celebrity spokesperson for PETA, Viva!, and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. McCartney also co-founded Meat Free Monday with his daughters Stella and Mary McCartney. McCartneys first wife was American photographer Linda Eastman, who passed away in 1998. His marriage to British model/activist Heather Mills ended in a very bitter and public divorce in 2008. Shevell is McCartneys third wife, and Shevells previous marriage to attorney Bruce Blakeman ended in divorce in 2008. The McCartney/Shevell nuptials took place at a historic place, on a historic date. The Marylebone Registry Office is where McCartney married his first wife in 1969, and October 9, 2011 would have been John Lennons 71st birthday. What They Wore Vegans do not wear silk, wool, fur, leather, suede, feathers or anything that comes from an animal. Both Nancy Shevells dress and Paul McCartneys suit were designed by Pauls daughter, fashion designer Stella McCartney. Although she does use wool and silk in her designs, Stella is an outspoken animal advocate, staunchly standing against fur and leather in an industry that cares little about nonhuman lives. Raised an ethical vegetarian by parents Paul and Linda McCartney, Stella says, Ethical thinking is a parcel of the way we were brought up. It first came from diet. When it came to working in fashion, it would have been very hypocritical of me to work with leather and fur. For us, being vegetarian was never about health, but because we didn’t believe in killing animals. It is not known whether Nancy Shevells wedding dress or Paul McCartneys suit were vegan, but because they were designed by Stella McCartney, they could not have contained fur or leather. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Shevells shoes were also designed by Stella McCartney, and were vegan. The designer and materials of Sir Pauls shoes are unknown. Shevells dress was inspired by the dress worn by the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, when she married the Duke of Windsor in 1937. What They Ate According to the Daily Mail, the meal at the reception was meat-free and organic, including Dumangin Grande Reserve champagne costing  £26.50 a bottle and a vegan cake made of sugar, soya milk, apple cider vinegar, wheat flower (sic), cocoa powder and vanilla cream paste. Rounding out the menu, which daughter Stella helped choose, were rocket and basil salad, goat cheese polenta, savory tarts, and dumplings and a traditional wedding cake in addition to the vegan cake, according to Hello! magazine. Is Nancy Shevell Vegetarian? According to an unidentified friend quoted in the Daily Mail, Nancy has toned down her super-Republican views and given up her beloved steaks . . . When they travelled around America this summer, they lived on avocado sandwiches and tomato soup. Now Nancy orders veggie food all the time. While some blogs and news outlets have labeled Shevell a vegetarian based on this quote, celebrity-wary animal advocates will wait for more evidence before endowing her with the v label. McCartneys first wife, Linda, went vegetarian along with Paul one day when they were eating lamb chops and saw their own lambs outside their window and made the connection. Linda McCartney Foods continues to sell frozen meatless meals. McCartneys second wife, Heather Mills, has stated that she went vegan when she lost her leg and the wound would not heal. After her divorce from McCartney, Mills opened VBites, a vegan restaurant that she hopes to turn into a chain. Always the Activist McCartney often takes advantage of the attention he draws to raise awareness for causes like animal rights, the environment and land mines, and used his wedding to Shevell as an opportunity to raise funds for charity. The official wedding portraits, shot by his photographer daughter Mary, were released to media in exchange for a  £1,000 donation to Meat Free Monday.