English Rowan TH

     Sag Harbor is probably the book we've read that talks the most about childhood. Fun Home  did discuss childhood but mostly in the context of explaining adult behaviors, and most of the other books we have read have focused on their protagonist's adolescence. By looking back at Beji's childhood so much, Sag Harbor  gives us the idea that coming-of-age is not just a series of firsts, it is also a series of lasts. Growing into new things also means growing out of old things. In the very first chapter, Ben sets this tone by mentioning how Reggie no longer wants to bike around the neighborhood with him even though they always had before, saying "It was the last time we'd start the summer that way" (31).     This idea goes through the whole book and I think that it can be picked up in a lot of different examples of the way that Benji interacts with his friends and often feels behind. One of the quotes that jumped out to me as exemplifying this ide...

    Jason is bullied pretty ruthlessly in this book. It's so intense that it sort of defined the whole book for me even though the Chapter "Maggot" about the bullying was the 9th chapter of only 13. I think that it works this way not just because of the intensity of what Jason experienced, but also because of the way that it is built up through all of his social interactions in all 8 chapters that come before "Maggot". In the first chapters especially, Jason is constantly talking about his fear of judgment from his peers, and how it is inevitable if he does certain things. On just page 6 he says if people knew about his poetry they would "gouge [him] to death behind the tennis courts with blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo oh [his] gravestone." He's constantly censoring himself, concealing the things that he is interested in, concealing his poetry, even trying to conceal his friendship with Dean Moran even though Dean is basically ...

    It's pretty clear throughout Fun Home  that Allison Bechdel really wants to view her and her father, Bruce, as complementary opposites. She frames their lives as parallel but conflicting, and in the end, her coming out coincides with her father's death. The end of his story is the beginning of hers or something along those lines. One of the most interesting elements of this parallel that she draws was their complimentary relationships with gender. Early in the book Bechdel introduces the idea of her and Bruce's conflicting worldviews, representing this duality in extremely gendered terms "I was Spartan to my father's Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly... Utilitarian to his aesthete" (15).  Here she connects herself to masculinity, aggression, and practicality, and her father to feminity, weakness, and, importantly, useless decoration that she frames as artifice or deception. Later she introduces the idea of "sexual inversion" s...

    The story of The Bell Jar  is fundamentally one about mental health and the fairly severe six-month psychological break that Esther experiences during it. Many coming-of-age protagonists suffer mental health issues, Holden Caulfield, for example, definitely had some stuff going on and we theorized that he might be in a mental hospital while telling the story of The Catcher in the Rye . However, the severity of Esther's illness is something that I think is quite rare, in other words, this is not a universalizing coming-of-age narrative. Sylvia Plath is not trying to access some sort of essence of adulthood and convey it to the reader, she is telling the story of one specific person, arguably herself.      It is undeniably true that people can relate to Esther Greenwood and her struggles. After all, many of the issues that she struggles to reconcile are larger sociocultural problems that affect many women of her generation, race, and status. It is also tr...

     Over the course of our reading J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye,  I have attempted to come up with a clear and simple thesis to Holden Caulfield's worldview. It is not that his view of the world is complicated. It is something that is immediately familiar without being completely explicable or tangible from the first paragraph of his narration. His hatred of movies, of people doing things to make money or because they experience societal pressure to do so, and Holden's disdain for this exemplified through his own refusal to "participate in society" are all reminiscent of so many angsty boy pop-cultural classics. Of course, his positions themselves stem more from his place in society than any removal from it. However, regardless of his perspective's familiarity I still could not really explain exactly what it is that he believes or what drives it. There is no central problem or battle that he is fighting, no underclass that he represents, and no one,...

    In my essay, I talked about the idea of "coming-of-age as someone else" as it applies to Moonlight  the film that I watched for this project. In Moonlight  the main character, Chiron a young gay black man growing up in poverty, goes through the process of growing into himself, a process which is extremely hampered by his circumstances. Now I am not black or impoverished so it would be a little foolish to attempt to understand "what Chiron is going through" because I simply cannot, however, what I do see is the way that Chiron is not allowed by his circumstances to be all facets of himself at all times. He is very shy and soft-spoken, but these characteristics get him bullied by his peers and yelled at by his mother so eventually, he covers them up with a hard, cool exterior. Throughout the course of the movie which is told in three distinct parts, we develop a pretty clear understanding of Chiron's reasoning for building up a personality that really is not w...