A Comparison
I plan on comparing the novels of three different
authors. All of these authors are female, and all of their main characters in
these novels are also female. Two
of the novels feature girls who are
growing older, and the other one features a woman who grows in a different way. All of
these authors are women of color. The main
thread that connects all of these works is the strength that all of
the main characters achieve by the end of the novels. Good novels can have strong female main characters.
The first of
these novels that I will compare with my book group novel is My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki. Ruth Ozeki is a Japanese American, and so is her
main character, Jane Takagi-Little. This book
is about the journey that Jane embarks on when she accepts a job as a coordinator for a
series called “My American Wife!” that was to be filmed in the United States for
viewing in Japan. This series is supposed to
promote beef for a national lobby organization called BEEF-EX. This novel also touches on the life of a Japanese
wife of one of the advertising executives that promote beef for BEEF-EX in Japan. For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing
primarily on Jane. During the onset of the
novel, Jane is the proverbial starving artist. When
this job is offered to her, she doesn’t think a whole lot about the consequences, or
even if there will be consequences. During
the course of the story, Jane starts to grow and gain strength in herself. There are episodes that she shoots despite the
fact that she knows that she will face displeasure from the lobbyists and the advertising
firm. Specifically one that showcases a
couple of lesbian vegetarians. Now, the whole
purpose of the show is to showcase beef, with a wholesome American family as background. The fact that Jane chose to use these two women
(with substantial urging from one of her crew, Suzuki) shows that she’s already
starting to find the strength that she will need for the books finale. The reply that she receives from the advertising
agency that pays for the series is not exactly uplifting.
“Dear Miss Tagaki,
I regret to
inform you that your program of vegetarian lesbians is unacceptable to Mr. J. Ueno who
insist that you must resign from director of My
American Wive! Every again. Your program
will not be aired and our company must suffer grave humiliation of admitting failure to
provide fresh program to Network and must air old rerun program in the slot.
Sincerely yours,
Mariko Nakano
(for Mr. J. Ueno)
cc. Mr. S. Kato (179)”
Jane manages to ride out this little
storm, but does have to put up with more scrutiny from above. During this time, Jane also is engaging in a
romantic interlude with a musician named Sloan. This
does not detract from Jane’s strength, but adds to it.
There’s a lot more that happens during the course of this novel, but I
have chosen to focus on the strength that the character exhibits at the end of the book. Jane finds out some very unsavory facts about the
cattle business, both past and present, and chooses to film a documentary outside of the
series that she is working on for BEEF-EX. This
series shows the unpleasant side of the beef industry.
Jane fights with herself over this, knowing that it will cost her her job. She finally comes to a certain positive
realization, and is able to fully tap the strength within herself. “Stupidity becomes proactive, a political
statement. Our collective norm. Maybe this exempts me as an individual, but it
sure makes me entirely culpable as a global media maker(334-335).” With this thought, Jane is finally able to find
peace within herself, and exhibits the strength of character that the author, Ruth
Ozeki,
has led us to expect.
This brings me
to the next book that I have chosen to compare with the book that I am doing my research
project on. This one is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale
Hurston. Hurston’s main character, named Janie, is
little more than a child when we first encounter her.
She is in her late teens. From
this point on, we learn about Janie’s three marriages, and the growth that comes from
each one. During her first marriage, Janie
learns that love doesn’t always grow between two people, no matter how much you may
want it to. “’Cause you told me Ah
mus gointer love him, and, and Ah don’t. Maybe
if somebody was to tell me how, Ah could do it(23).”
Soon after this Janie decides to run off with another man, even though she
knows she doesn’t love him. “Janie
pulled back a long time because he did not represent sun-up and pollen and blooming trees,
but he spoke for far horizon. He spoke for
change and chance(29).” During this
second marriage, Janie again tries to love her husband, and succeeds to some degree. This second marriage didn’t have the kind of
communication that a strong marriage should have, so it had already fallen onto the dust
heap by the time her husband died. After the
death of her second husband, Janie started discovering her strength. When she takes up with a younger man, it is
against everything that the people in the town that she lives in wants for her. Marrying him and moving away, to take each day as
it comes, shows that Janie has gained strength with age.
When Janie loses her husband and moves back to town, everybody wants to know
why she comes back alone, but Janie tells the story only to her good friend
Phoeby, and at
the end of the story, imparts a few words of advice.
“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh to tuh God, and they got tuh find out
about livin’ fuh themselves(192).” With
these words, Janie shows that she has finally come into her full strength. This novel was written at a time when women were
still not exactly encouraged to be strong, and I believe that the strong female main
character had at least a little to do with the outcry against it when it was first
published in 1937. In the foreword at the
beginning of this novel, there are excerpts from several reviews that were done at the
time, all denouncing Hurston and her novel. “Alain
Locke, dean of black scholars and critics during the Harlem Renaissance, wrote in his
yearly review of the literature for Opportunity
magazine that Hurston’s Their Eyes was
simply out of step with the more serious trends of the times(x).” I can’t help but wonder if that same
criticism would have been made had this novel
been written by a male author, and the female main character not been as strong? The risk that Zora Neale Hurston chose to take in
portraying a strong black female during the late 30’s was greater than we might
think, growing up in today’s world. I
believe that the character growth and strength shown at the end of the novel by Zora Neale
Hurston was very good.
This brings me
to the book that I’m doing my research paper on.
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi
Dangarembga. While this book was written in
the modern era, it is set in Rhodesia in the 1960’s, while that country was still
under white rule, and the black male patriarchy ruled the families. The main character is a young girl named
Tambudzai, among the supporting cast are her uncle, Babamukuru who is the patriarch of
this particular family, his wife Maiguru and two children, Chido his son, and Nyasha his
daughter. Tambu’s mother is called
Mainini which is mother in Shona, her father is Jeremiah, Babamukuru’s brother, and
she has an older brother named Nhamo who dies early in the novel (allowing Tambu the
privilege of going to school at the mission, for if Nhamo had not died, she may never have
had the opportunity), and two younger sisters. There
is also Lucia, Tambu’s aunt, her mother’s sister.
Lucia proves to be a fairly strong character herself, and in some ways,
Lucia’s strength helps Tambu towards the end of the book. Early on in the book, Tambu’s father tells
her that they do not have the money to send her to school, so Tambu undertakes to raise
mealies (ears of corn) to get the necessary money for her tuition for her second year at
school. She ends up receiving the money
during a trip to town to sell her mealies, but not by selling the corn, but rather by way
of a donation that is given by a gray-haired white lady to whom certain not-quite-true
circumstances are explained by the headmaster of the school that Tambu wishes to attend. The money is enough to pay for several terms at
school. Tambu shows her strength early on,
and resolves not to lose sight of who she is and where she comes from. “Some strategy had to be devised to prevent
all this splendour from distracting me in the way that my brother had been distracted. Usually in such dire straits I used my thinking
strategy. I was very proud of my thinking
strategy. It was meant to put me above the
irrational levels of my character and enable me to proceed from pure, rational
premises(69-70).” This thought pretty
much sets the tone for the rest of the book. Tambu
tries to stay strong and true to herself, but sometimes she has to fight her own self to
do that. By the end of the book, after
staying at the mission for several years, living with Babamukuru and his family,
experiencing some of the pain and frustration that Nyasha felt, and going on to an all
girls college with the help of a scholarship, Tambu learns some very important lessons. “Quietly, unobtrusively and extremely
fitfully, something in my mind began to assert itself, to question things and refuse to be
brainwashed, bringing me to this time when I can set down this story(204).” By the end of the novel we find that Tsitsi
Dangarembga has developed her characters strength to be such that she can even overcome
the male patriarchy that dominates, at least in her own life.
I have come to
the conclusion that very often in this day and age we take many things for granted when it
comes to reading novels. A strong female
character is no longer an anomaly, more often it is accepted as a given. In the late 1930’s here in the United States,
a strong black female character was an anomaly. Especially
one who did not spew out the black rhetoric of the time.
In Zimbabwe today, black female authors are few and far between, and strong
black female main characters are even more so. Dangarembga’s
story is referred to as a “coming of age story” by Maurice Taonezvi Vambe in an
article I found on the web. The address is: http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/zimbabwe/gender/mtvambe4.html. I chose to disagree to some degree. Tambu had, and exhibited this strength early on,
the fact that she had to regain the strength when she became older doesn’t
necessarily make it a “coming of age” story.
All of the women that I have showcased here have found the strength that
they needed, at the time that they needed it. All
of these women show remarkable growth in this area, aided and abetted by their creators,
three very strong women themselves.
Works Cited
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes
Were Watching God. New York. Harper Collins. 1937.
Ozeki, Ruth L. My Year of
Meats. New York. Penguin Books.
1998.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Conditions.
Seattle. Seal Press. 1989
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