Week 5, entry one and two

Week 5, entry one

from Passing and The Fire in the Flint

Based on the excerpts, both Larsen’s Passing and White’s The Fire in the Flint, display two male physicians in different ways. Brian, Irene Redfield’s husband in Passing, is seen as a strong-willed physician frustrated by his professional growth. Brian principally acts in the excerpt as a means to understand Irene’s focus on sustaining the middle-class respectability she has found in Harlem. Kenneth Harper, the protagonist in The Fire in the Flint, exercises his solution to the race problem by bettering his own circumstances. While the introduction to the excerpt mentions a love of Kenneth’s she appears nowhere in the selected portions of The Fire in the Flint. While Jane Phillips, Kenneth’s love, is absent, his office is stocked with other females that work inversely to the relationship of Brian and Irene Redfield. The women in The Fire in the Flint excerpt¸ are there to express Kenneth’s belief that the racial issue would be resolved if all blacks could improve their situation.

The first two women introduced in the excerpt are Kenneth’s mother and Mamie. Both function as representatives on behalf of Kenneth’s practice, the vital networkers needed to introduce blacks in Georgia to Kenneth’s deft surgical skills. Kenneth’s mom is an astounding character in and of herself, an articulate women who managed to preserve her serenity while her son was in the North. The descriptions afforded to the two other doctors, Dr. Williams and Dr. Bennett, describe in a roundabout way the culture of the Georgia town where Kenneth practices. Williams affects almost a false intelligence and austerity, with his love of Latin words, and his refrain of the busy work schedule he keeps. He drives a shiny Ford, but levels the power distance between himself, the driver, and the onlookers, by raucously calling out to those on the streets. His arrival is more of a carnival than it is the serious, revered entrance of a dignified individual (which I think Williams wishes it was more the latter rather than the former). Dr. Bennett is proof of the durability of traditional Souther thinking, with nearly all descriptions of him or his buggy involving some passage of time. It was in this backdrop, traditional Southerners, black demagogues, that Kenneth’s mother lived those years without Kenneth. Mrs. Harper is an intermediary moving between the poor Georgian community and the highly educated office of Kenneth, a woman who can bridge blacks and their present circumstance and racial uplift.

Mrs. Johnson is another woman in Kenneth’s office who seems to represent the belief of Kenneth’s that skill, talent, and education translates to a desirable life. She held a respectable career as a nurse at a hospital, but now leads a domestic life with her husband in Central City. Addressing how one betters his individual circumstance is seen through Mrs. Johnson: skill, talent, and education.


Week 5, entry two

from “The Closing Door”

While reading Grimke’s “The Closing Door,” the fairest intertextual comparison seemed to be the work of Edgar Allen Poe, particularly “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The comparison between the two works attests to the social burdens that can drive the central characters to hysteria. The elements Poe outlined in pioneering and popularizing Gothic fiction are present in Grimke’s work: the narrator as a character (suggesting some unreliability), suspense, isolation, and finally hysteria resulting from some social ill.

The narrator’s relationship with Agnes shapes the retelling of the events, as she outlines from the beginning: “I wish I might show you Agnes Milton of those far off happy days” (Grimke, 487). The suspense arises also very early in the short story, arriving in the form of a bill with no accompanying service expectant of a bill. The characters are all charged something, but what charges them is unclear. Discovering that charge becomes integral to the denouement of the plot. The suspense is further heightened when the service they paid for, the telegram, arrives, reading only: “Bob died suddenly. Under no circumstances come. Father” (Grimke, 489). The weight of that news isolates the characters, because almost improbably Joe, Agnes’ brother and a reporter of the event, shows up shortly after the telegram. Agnes is removed to the kitchen to save her from any grisly news Joe may have while the narrator and her husband, Jim, remain in the scene to hear from Joe. The narrator and Jim make it a point to guard Agnes from any news, though she still hears it and faints.

Agnes and Roderick Usher both seem driven to hysteria by social forces outside their control. Agnes’ refrain, “I’m an instrument” serves to describe not only her but also Roderick. Roderick could not continue the revered Usher bloodline or withstand the pressure of that high society living. Agnes cannot make sense of the brutality and barbarism that racism begets. Rather than reproduce another instrument, Agnes kills her own child and to guarantee she produces no more tools, she kills herself. The death caused by the supernatural events in Poe’s story is matched by the death caused by the despair and resentment in Grimke’s work.