Though absolutely devastating and often hard to swallow, the position of enslaved African American women described by Brenda E. Stevenson in “Slave Marriage and Family Relations” evoked the kinds of power that we had read about earlier (Nancy Cott). Women had little say in determining the path of romance in their lives and would often […]
Re: Jumping the Broomstick; Brief commentary on Sula Power relations festered inside the slave’s realm of sexual relations. Slave women resisted sexual advances by men of both colors, fostering the idea that “principle” was the only thing they had. They sought to preserve their bodies, usually in forlorn efforts, and, on the contrary, they, many […]
Thoughts on Sula In her essay, Stevenson presents a very clear, though complex, depiction of slave sexual and marital relations; sex was generally encouraged only between married couples and pre-marital pregnancy led to marriage, and, in terms of monogamous relationships, fidelity was highly valued. Most important in her analysis is her assertion that “[Slave kin] […]
Sula’s Sex Powers I thought that the pedagogization of sex that was present throughout the novel was an interesting contrast to the Stevenson essay in which women equated sex with principle. As a previous poster stated, Sula learned her sexual behaviors from her mother, Hannah. Hannah was described as sleeping with men easily and often. […]
Sula (No Other Title Necessary) Last year one of my political science professors was talking about the 2004 presidential election. He mentioned that in a debate between the two VPs (Cheney and Edwards), the two were asked a question about the number of black women in America getting infected with AIDS every year. As my […]
Or You Can Just Blame Your Mother… The Alfred Kinsey and US Senate reading this week seem the paramount example of scientia sexualis; numbers, facts, and (false) theories predominate in both pieces. But what interested me the most was the “blame game.” According to Kinsey, “disapproval of heterosexual coitus…before marriage is often an important factor […]
Nabokov and Kinsey present work that is provocative in the same way, though the former crafted an intricate work of fiction while the latter published research: Both writers confront the reader with a sexual matter the reader would like to deny by forcing him to recognize its presence in American life and society. This is […]
Power and Coercion in Lolita Part 2 of Lolita was heavy on the power relations, particularly between HH and Lo. Throughout their cross-country travels and stay at Beardsley, HH is impossibly controlling. To keep her as subdued as he can, Humbert uses the adult-child power dynamic to threaten Lo and holds money and other material […]
Unreliability, Psychology, Liberty Well we certainly get our fill of the unreliable narrator in Part 2 of Lolita. First, H.H. can’t remember his and Lolita’s travel itinerary (which contrast suspiciously with his seemingly photographic memory earlier). On their second cross-country trip there is the question of weather or not someone is following H.H. and Lolita, […]
Nabokov writes with beautiful ambiguity. He uses words in a way that makes the reader question what she just read and, perhaps, turn back to read it again. An example of this is seen in Chapter 13 when Humbert apparently masturbates on the couch next to Lolita while she is oblivious to what he is […]
