Humanities - Diversity In American Literature

HU-DV 2610-001

Instructor: Clyda Rae Blackburn

Fall 2010 Semester

Reflection

In my humanities class, first semester of my Freshman Year at Salt Lake Community College, I learned a great deal about literature composed by American writers.  Beginning in the third volume of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume C, we learned of slave literature- mostly written and composed by African-American authors depicting the life and after effects of slavery.  I was very humbled by the story, "The Passing of Grandison", written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt in 1899.  Beginning with a story of Caucasian Plantation owners in the Southern States, we learn that slave ownership was almost seen as a privilege, or sign of power and wealth.  As the story continues, we begin to see the true allegiance of the slaves.  This allegiance is not to their Masters of the plantation, but to their friends and family- and to freedom.  A very beautifully written story that brought to light many issues I had not yet been made aware of.   

Later in Volume C, we read a story that stood out to me by Henry James, "Daisy Miller: A Study".  In this specific story, we learn to know a young American Woman, by the name of Daisy Miller, who is traveling abroad with her mother and young brother to see Europe and become 'finished' as the high class would call it.  In her travels, she comes across a man named Mr. Winterbourne.  Immediately we became aware of the symbolism in the names, Daisy being a lighthearted, loving young lady, and Winterbourne being a cold, conceited, calculated man.  Throughout the story, Daisy truly shows the price to be paid for being yourself.  She was whispered about among the high class people she associated with in Europe, judging her for her American ways of frivolity and carelessness.  As I previously mentioned, she definitely paid the ultimate price- death socially and physically, by traveling by night in Rome, where Roman Fever was evident, to see the Colosseum by moonlight.  She caught Roman Fever, after being scolded by Mr. WInterbourne and her peers, and died a death of loneliness.   This struck me very hard, resembling the fact that she was not being careless or frivolous, but just who she believed to be herself.  I wish more people, including myself, had courage such as this to live day-to-day without any care towards judgement from other people.   

In contrast to Daisy Miller's story, Upton Sinclair wrote a telling tale of immigration and the lack of a  health code in, "The Jungle".  In this story, we see a family travel to America in search of fame and fortune, in contrast to their meek and homely lives in Europe.  This story was originally written to portray the hard lives immigrants lived when they entered the packing plants in Chicago, but while reading Sinclair's fictional account, we see the author's passion of hate against the lack of health codes in the meat packing plants in the late 1800's and early 1900's.  This portrayed a harsh reality to me in terms of the horrible, and dangerous conditions that early immigrants faced just to scrape by in a foreign country.  I have never experienced anything like that, and it was very interesting to read about- and sort of disgusting.