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Symbolism within the Stories
When
reading the books assigned in class, I have noticed that the authors use symbolism to get
a certain message across to the readers. The
authors write about marriage and emphasis how import marriage is in different cultures and
communities. Now days, marriage is very
important, and it’s very interesting to see authors write about marriage in their
books. The authors used characters to symbolize a portray marriage as a very important
event in a peoples lives, no matter what culture they are from.
In
the book Fools Crow, the author, James Welch uses his characters to portray
marriage in the lives of the Blackfoot Indians. From
the very beginning of the book, White Man’s Dog was teased about hot having any girls
to flirt with, or posses any great wealth. The
amount of wives and possessions a man owned showed others his wealth, and power. “His father, Rides at the Door, had many
horses and three wives…” (3) But soon after, when he became more serious and
wise, White Mans Dog began looking at the other girls to choose the right one. What does this mean for us? It was very important for White Mans Dog to marry
some girl that he was going to love and take care of.
It was also very important which family this girl came from, and White Man’s
Dog family wanted him to get a girl from a known family, and, yet the young man wasn’t
interested in her. It really didn’t
matter to him, family the right girl came from, what mattered more to him, was getting the
right one for him. This small decision makes
a huge difference in today’s society. Some
people marry because of money, fame, or looks and they don’t look at the deeper side
of the whole marriage issue. Unlike White Man’s
Dog, because she was advises to, in a sense, Janie got married because of material goods.
In
the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, the author Zora Neale Huston’s main
character Janie, goes through three different marriages to find happiness. The first time, she was pushed towards marrying
Logan because he had money and land, but Janie didn’t find it in her heart to love
him (26). Marriage was very important to her
because she was a black woman and this would give her some more privileges then she had
before. But being married to Logan didn’t
mean much to her because she didn’t love him as she really wanted to love someone. Then along came Joe and she left to get married to
him, but only because she thought she loved him. He
paid attention to her and at first, was the ideal husband, but with time, he was very
disrespectful of her. Once again, Janie ws
stuck in a marriage where she wasn’t happy. The
last person she ment, Tea Cake, she truly loved with her whole heart. She married him when the whole community
disapproved of him and their marriage, but Janie was happy at last, and although no-one
was pleases with her decision to be with Tea Cake, she paid no attention to them because
she was in love with her man. Marriage was
very important to the author and thus when writing this book, she wanted us to understand
the difference a marriage to a certain person, can make, just like Lorrie Moore did too.
In
the book Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, her story “Real Estate” uses
her characters to symbolize marriage, in the average American family life. Ruth, the main character in the short story, is
living her life normally and nothing could possibly go wrong, but then she find out her
husband was having an affair. “Oh, the
rich torment that was life. She didn’t
investigate Terence’s activities anymore…” (181). Although Ruth didn’t make too much of her
husband’s affair, most typical Americans would have filed for divorce by now, for
having an affair is very common in marriages because people aren’t happy in their
marriage. I’m sure that at first, Ruth
and her husband Terence were happy, but as time went on, their relationship fell apart. Good marriages hold families together, but in
today’s society, we find that there are more and more divorces because people aren’t
happy in their marriages. Today, community
plays a large role in marriages, deciding for the people instead of the people deciding
for themselves, on how they are to marry and the books tie into the whole issue of
marriage.
Most of Lorrie Moore’s short stories
include people in marriage or some type of relationship.
It was like Moore understood the problem of today’s married couples,
for most of her stories were quite simple and in come cases, easy to relate to. Moore’s stories were interesting and
normally, whatever the problem in the story, it doesn’t get resolved. Like mentioned earlier, when reading the book, one
might find that there is some relation to his of her life because Moore wrote of some
basic day-to-day situations. The sense of
some sort of dilemma might look negative, but when reading about it, one might find a
quick solution to the problem, mostly because it’s not their own, but someone else’s
problem. Moore’s ‘birds’ book,
is the strongest book that she has yet written and like Phil Nel, a professor of English
at The College of Charleston said, “Moore’s current collection of stories
combines sharp wit and gentle sadness, deep pain and wry humor in a manner more nuanced
and fully realized that anything she ad written thus far” (1). Moore’s book of short stories, are an
imitation of the American people’s marriages, and problems. Moore wanted her readers to understand her
character’s problems, so that people would learn from other’s mistakes and not
repeat them ourselves.
Moore,
Huston and Welch all used their characters in one way or the other, to tell their readers
something about marriage. Moore’s short
stories helped understand the difficulty of keeping a lasting marriage. Welch wrote of the Indians and how marriage was
very important to the men in the tribe. Those
men would never for anything, divorce or leave their wives, for that behavior was
unacceptable in their culture. Hurston wrote
on behalf of the black community and made us realize how women had almost no rights and
married for survival. It didn’t matter
that they didn’t love their spouse, all it mattered was that they were married and
one was going to support the other. This is
not the way marriage is suppose to be. Marriage
is the basis for love, trust, patience and the list goes on. These three authors used the characters in their
books to make us see the big picture and make us think of how to solve some marriage
problems that always surface in marriages. All
three of these authors wrote from their experiences or ties to their culture, and that was
what made their works more understandable and symbolic.
Because of the marriage ties we see in these three books, we can find that
in some way, it all relates to our community today.
WORKS CITED:
Hurston,
Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Pg 26.
Moore, Lorrie. Birds of America. Alfred A. Knopf, New
York, 1998. pg 161.
Nel, Phil. “Short Stories real, emotional”.
October 25, 1998: Charleston.Net; March 5, 2001. http://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/reviews/moore.html
Welch, James. Fools Crow. Viking Penguin
Inc., 1986. pg 3.
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