In Song of Solomon , there is the idea that love has to be twisted. Every example of love in the book depicts love as an ultra-violent force that controls and ruins lives. However, I think that the book also shows that love has to be “wrong” in order to exist. Love must be abnormal, and it won’t work out. Throughout the story Ruth is described as having a perverted relationship with her father. From what we are told, she got great satisfaction from that connection. Macon describes his wife as “laying next to him. Naked as a yard dog, kissing him.” Ruth even says that her father was “the only person who ever really cared whether I lived or died”. That even despite this unnatural pairing there was still a very intense love. Then there is Hagar and Milkman. First Milkman and Hagar are cousins, which even back then was taboo. The rest of the town also considers this relationship to be wrong. “Ought to be shamed, the two of them. Cousins .” However, this is the only we...
Wide Sargasso by Jean Rhys Sea is similar to another short story we read in previous English classes. In subbie year we read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (or at least the current juniors did). Wide Sargasso Sea has a lot of similarities, especially Antionette’s confinement in England, with the Yellow Wallpaper. Just to refresh anyone who doesn’t remember the Yellow Wallpaper. It’s told from the point of view of a woman whose recently given birth. However, she feels a detachment from her baby (postpartum depression based on a modern diagnosis). Her husband, John, puts her a room in their colonial mansion with torn yellow wallpaper and scratched floors as a “rest cure”. Her only stimulus is the wallpaper. She starts to envision a figure creeping behind the wall. At the end of the story, she tears off the wallpaper as she tries to free the figure. When her husband comes in, she is crawling on the floor and has “become” the figure in the wallpaper. Ove...