Mudbound

AGENDA:
EQ:  WHAT IS FIRST PERSON NARRATION AND WHY DID JORDAN CHOOSE TO USE IT FOR MUDBOUND WITH 6 DIFFERENT VOICES?

HMWK:  for Wednesday, read through pg. 82

THINK, PAIR, SHARE:

Having read the first two chapters of Mudbound, work with a partner to answer the following questions and discuss your answers.

Level 1 questions  Close Reading for text details
1. How are Jamie and Henry related?
2. What is Jamie doing at the beginning of the book?
3. Why is Jamie rushing in what he is doing at the beginning of the book?
4. How deep does Henry dig the grave at the beginning of the book?
5. Why does Henry dig so deep at the beginning of the book?
6. Who is Henry digging a grave for at the beginning of the book?
7. How is the coffin described at the beginning of the book?
8. What did Laura decide on her 30th birthday?
9. What is Henry's last name?
10. What is Henry's occupation?
11. Who introduced Laura and Henry?
12. Who encouraged Henry to pursue Laura?
13. Why did Henry leave town while courting Laura?
14. What did Henry do when he returned to town while courting Laura?
15. How did Laura describe Jamie when she met him?
16. How much older than Jamie is Henry?
17. When did Laura meet most of Henry's family?
18. How did Laura describe Henry's family when she met them?
19. Where was Laura married?
20. How long did Laura have bliss in her marriage?

What can you infer from your answers about the characters and their relationships?
What kind of foreshadowing of the plot can you infer from what Laura says on the bottom of pg. 13-the top of pg. 14?

Level 2 questions  Interpretation of Literary Strategy

Discuss some of the reasons for choosing this kind of first person narration. How does seeing
these events through many different character's eyes affect the story? How does this kind of narration make you feel as a reader? Do you like it? Do you think it will enhance the plot? Why or why not? What do all the different viewpoints do to the narrative? Why is this not through the eyes of one main character?

POST A COMMENT OF YOUR OBSERVATIONS AS A TEAM CITING EVIDENCE FROM THE TEXT TO SUPPORT YOUR CLAIMS.

Style
Point of View
The novel is written in the first person point of view. The narrating character changes from section to section with the writer alerting the reader to the change in narrating character by placing the character's name at the beginning of the chapter section.
The use of the first person point of view is an intimate choice, allowing the writer to speak directly to the reader through the voice of her characters. In most first person point of view novels, the narrating character is the main character of the novel and the entire novel is told through that character's eyes. However, in this novel the writer uses all the major characters in her novel as her narrating characters, giving the reader a well-rounded story while still keeping the intimacy of the first person point of view. It is a new and unique way to use the first person point of view and is handled with great skill.

Setting
The majority of the novel takes place at Mudbound, a moderate sized farm on the Mississippi Delta. The farm is primitive, lacking some of the basic comforts such as electricity and running water. The farm is constantly covered in mud from the frequent storms that pass over the area and dust when the rains are kept at bay. As a part of the south in the1940s, the setting of the novel is also a hotbed of racial tensions, leaving the black characters of the novel in danger of the lawlessness of the time toward blacks.
The setting of this novel is important because the time and place sets up some of the tensions that propel the plot. The uncomfortable accommodations of the farm create a situation that allows Laura to feel neglected by her husband and opens her to an inappropriate relationship with her brother-in-law. At the same time, the setting also places a great burden on the Jackson family, a black tenant family on Mudbound who face many obstacles in their attempts to raise a family and live a comfortable life. With the return of their son from the war, these obstacles grow substantially as he finds himself a target of racial hatred. For these reasons, the setting of the novel is deeply essential to the tensions that drive the plot to its climax.

Language and Meaning
The language of the novel is basic English. The author has created characters who are living in a time period and place that has its own unique uses of language. The author does not delve deeply into the slang that characterizes this time period, but she does use some basic grammar choices that makes the characters come to life and feel authentic to their time period.
The language of this novel is basic, simple English that is not filled with too many difficult words or phrases or unique grammar and spellings. However, some of the language is a little more complicated than the reader might expect in order to reflect the high education level of two of the main characters. The writer does not slip into stereotypes to express the thoughts and opinions of some of the main characters, moving slightly away from authenticity, but making her novel easy for the average reader to enjoy.

Structure
The novel is divided into three parts. Each part is filled with sections that tell a story from the narrative point of view of more than six characters. These characters tell their story in the first person point of view, each giving their own vision of a series of events that lead to tragedy for two families. The story is told in the past tense, beginning in the present and moving into the past to explain how the characters got to that point in their lives.
The novel contains multiple plots, including one main plot and multiple subplots. The main plot tells the story of how the Jackson and McAllan families became involved in the maiming of one young man. Some of the subplots describe the relationships between all the main characters, the romance between Laura and Jamie, and the difficulties Pappy causes for all those around him. Each plot comes to a satisfying conclusion at the end of the novel.

WRITING PRACTICE:
Test 1 from Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Far Away 
Choose one paragraph and write it in 3rd person.  How does this change the paragraph?

Hillary Jordan reading first chapter of Mudbound

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=hillary+Jordan&FORM=HDRSC3#view=detail&mid=053D91D37942704B565D053D91D37942704B565D

Mudbound by Hilary Jordan

Welcome Back to SOTA and Contemporary Writers

AGENDA:

Read previous post by Jane Hirschfield

Read Terry Tempest Williams' "Why I Write"

Write your own "Why I Write"

Sign out Mudbound

Go to website:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88195380

Listen to interview on NPR
Read excerpt

Interview with Hilary Jordan:

http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1538/Hillary-Jordan

More about Mudbound:

http://www.hillaryjordan.com/books-mudbound.php

In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm --- a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not --- charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.

The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Barbara Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."

1. The setting of the Mississippi Delta is intrinsic to Mudbound. Discuss the ways in which the land functions as a character in the novel and how each of the other characters relates to it.

2. Mudbound is a chorus, told in six different voices. How do the changes in perspective affect your understanding of the story? Are all six voices equally sympathetic? Reliable? Pappy is the only main character who has no narrative voice. Why do you think the author chose not to let him speak?

3. Who gets to speak and who is silent or silenced is a central theme, the silencing of Ronsel being the most literal and brutal example. Discuss the ways in which this theme plays out for the other characters. For instance, how does Laura's silence about her unhappiness on the farm affect her and her marriage? What are the consequences of Jamie's inability to speak to his family about the horrors he experienced in the war? How does speaking or not speaking confer power or take it away?

4. The story is narrated by two farmers, two wives and mothers, and two soldiers. Compare and contrast the ways in which these parallel characters, black and white, view and experience the world.

5. What is the significance of the title? In what ways are each of the characters bound --- by the land, by circumstance, by tradition, by the law, by their own limitations? How much of this binding is inescapable and how much is self-imposed? Which characters are most successful in freeing themselves from what binds them?

6. All the characters are products of their time and place, and instances of racism in the book run from Pappy’s outright bigotry to Laura’s more subtle prejudice. Would Laura have thought of herself as racist, and if not, why not? How do the racial views of Laura, Jamie, Henry, and Pappy affect your sympathy for them?

7. The novel deals with many thorny issues: racism, sexual politics, infidelity, war. The characters weigh in on these issues, but what about the author? Does she have a discernable perspective, and if so, how does she convey it?

8. We know very early in the book that something terrible is going to befall Ronsel. How does this sense of inevitability affect the story? Jamie makes Ronsel responsible for his own fate, saying "Maybe that's cowardly of me, making Ronsel's the trigger finger." Is it just cowardice, or is there some truth to what Jamie says? Where would you place the turning point for Ronsel? Who else is complicit in what happens to him, and why?

9. In reflecting on some of the more difficult moral choices made by the characters --- Laura's decision to sleep with Jamie, Ronsel's decision to abandon Resl and return to America, Jamie's choice during the lynching scene, Florence's and Jamie's separate decisions to murder Pappy --- what would you have done in those same situations? Is it even possible to know? Are there some moral positions that are absolute, or should we take into account things like time and place when making judgments?

10. How is the last chapter of Mudbound different from all the others? Why do you think the author chose to have Ronsel address you, the reader, directly? Do you believe he overcomes the formidable obstacles facing him and finds "something like happiness"? If so, why doesn't the author just say so explicitly? Would a less ambiguous ending have been more or less satisfying?

top of the page

"A supremely readable debut novel... Fluidly narrated by engaging characters . . . Mudbound is packed with drama. Pick it up, then pass it on."

— People, Critic’s Choice, 4-star review

"A compelling family tragedy, a confluence of romantic attraction and racial hatred that eventually falls like an avalanche... The last third of the book is downright breathless... An engaging story."

— Washington Post Book World

"In Hillary Jordan's first novel, Mudbound, the forces of change and resistance collide with terrible consequences."

— The New York Times

"Stunning... You are truly taken there by Jordan's powerful, evocative writing and complex characters."

— Boston Globe

 

Why I Write

Why I Write: Jane Hirshfield Writes about Life's Profound Mystery

Date: October 10, 2011

Summary: Prize-winning international poet, translator, and essayist Jane Hirshfield's poetry speaks to the central issues of human existence: desire and loss, impermanence and beauty, and the many dimensions of our connection with others. She tells NWP why she writes.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Why do I write?

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being. Any new metaphor is a telescope, a canoe in rapids, an MRI machine. And like that MRI machine, sometimes its looking is accompanied by an awful banging. To write can be frightening as well as magnetic. You don't know what will happen when you throw open your windows and doors.

To write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery.

Why write? You might as well ask a fish, why swim, ask an apple tree, why make apples? The eye wants to look, the ear wants to hear, the heart wants to feel more than it thought it could bear...

The writer, when she or he cannot write, is a person outside the gates of her own being. Not long ago, I stood like that for months, disbarred from myself. Then, one sentence arrived; another. And I? I was a woman in love. For that also is what writing is. Every sentence that comes for a writer when actually writing—however imperfect, however inadequate—every sentence is a love poem to this world and to our good luck at being here, alive, in it.

RELATED ARTICLES ON NWP.ORG

• Why I Write: A Celebration of the National Day on Writing
• Poet Laureate Kay Ryan: Poet as Teacher, Teacher as Poet
• Billy Collins: A `Reader's Poet' Reads at NWP's 2009 Annual Meeting

About the Author Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven collections of poetry, including After (shortlisted for England's T.S. Eliot Prize and named a "best book of 2006" by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the London Financial Times), Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), The Lives of the Heart, and The October Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her most recent book, a collection of poems entitled Come, Thief was published in August 2011. Hirshfield has taught at UC Berkeley, Duke University, Bennington College and elsewhere, and her many appearances at writers conferences and literary festivals in this country and abroad have been highly acclaimed.

End of Year

This is our last class.  It's been a great year...

Let's have breakfast.  Watch The Hours.  Relax...

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

The Hours

Listen to Michael Cunningham read the prologue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izNsXHDPWTE

Watch the opening of the film.


Research Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham links.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izNsXHDPWTE

Continue reading to pg. 48.


From wikipedia

Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel's story is of Clarissa's preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, the story travels forwards and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.

Plot summary

Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband; she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh and she "had not the option" to be with Sally Seton. Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning.
Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran of World War I suffering from deferred traumatic stress, spends his day in the park with his Italian-born wife Lucrezia, where they are observed by Peter Walsh. Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations, mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war. Later that day, after he is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital, he commits suicide by jumping out of a window.
Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party and gradually comes to admire the act of this stranger, which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness.

Characters

Clarissa Dalloway The fifty-one-year-old ("She had just broken into her fifty-second year" p. 31) ^[1] protagonist of the novel. She is the wife of Richard and mother of Elizabeth. She spends the day organizing a party that will be held that night while also reminiscing about the past. She is self-conscious about her role in London high society.
Richard Dalloway The disconnected and haughty husband of Clarissa. He is immersed in his work in government.
Elizabeth Dalloway Seventeen-year-old daughter of Clarissa and Richard. She is said to look "oriental" and has great composure. Compared to her mother, she takes great pleasure in politics and modern history, hoping to be either a doctor or farmer in the future.
Septimus Warren Smith A World War I veteran who suffers from "shell shock" and hallucinations of his deceased friend, Evans. Educated and decorated in the war, he is detached from society. He is married to Lucrezia from whom he has grown distant.
Lucrezia "Rezia" Smith The Italian wife of Septimus. She is burdened by his mental illness and believes that she is judged because of it. During most of the novel she is homesick for family and country, which she left to marry Septimus after the Armistice.
Sally Seton A love interest of Clarissa. She had a strained relationship with her family and spent much time with Clarissa's family in her youth. Sally is married to Lord Rosseter and has five boys. She can be described as feisty as well as a youthful ragamuffin.
Hugh Whitbread The pompous friend of Clarissa. Like Clarissa, he places much importance on his place in society. He holds an unspecified position in the British Royal household. Although he believes himself to be an essential member of the British aristocracy, Lady Bourton, Clarissa, Richard, and Peter find him to be obnoxious.
Peter Walsh He is an old friend of Clarissa. In the past, she rejected his marriage proposal. Now he has returned to England from India and is one of the guests at Clarissa's party. He is planning to marry Daisy.
Sir William Bradshaw Septimus is referred to the famous psychiatrist, Sir William Bradshaw, by his physician, Dr. Holmes. Bradshaw notes that Septimus has had a complete nervous breakdown and suggests spending time in the country as a cure.
Miss Kilman Miss Kilman is Elizabeth's history teacher, who has a degree in history and was fired from a teaching job during the war. She has a German ancestry. She wears an unattractive mackintosh coat because she does not care enough to dress to please others. She is a born-again Christian. She dislikes Clarissa intensely but she loves to spend time with Elizabeth.

Style

In Mrs Dalloway, all of the action, except flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. It is an example of free indirect discourse storytelling (not stream of consciousness because this story moves between the consciousnesses of every character in a form of discourse): every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, direct interior narration follows at least twenty characters in this way but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.
Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century (though Woolf herself, writing in 1928, apparently denied this^[2]). In her essay 'Modern Fiction', Woolf praised James Joyce's Ulysses, saying of the scene in the cemetery, "on a first reading at any rate, it is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece".^[3] The Hogarth Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, had to turn down the chance to publish the novel in 1919, because of the obscenity law in England, as well as the practical issues regarding publishing such a substantial text.
Woolf laid out some of her literary goals with the characters of Mrs Dalloway while still working on the novel. A year before its publication, she gave a talk at Cambridge University called "Character in Fiction," revised and retitled later that year as "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown."^[4]

Themes

The novel has two main narrative lines involving two separate characters (Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith); within each narrative there is a particular time and place in the past that the main characters keep returning to in their minds. For Clarissa, the "continuous present" (Gertrude Stein's phrase) of her charmed youth at Bourton keeps intruding into her thoughts on this day in London. For Septimus, the "continuous present" of his time as a soldier during the Great War keeps intruding, especially in the form of Evans, his comrade.

Mental illness

Septimus, as the shell-shocked war hero, operates as a pointed criticism of the treatment of mental illness and depression.^[5] Woolf lashes out at the medical discourse through Septimus' decline and suicide; his doctors make snap judgments about his condition, talk to him mainly through his wife and dismiss his urgent confessions before he can make them. Rezia remarks that Septimus "was not ill. Dr Holmes said there was nothing the matter with him".^[6]
Woolf goes beyond criticizing the treatment of mental illness. Using the characters of Clarissa and Rezia, she makes the argument that people can only interpret Septimus' shell-shock according to their cultural norms.^[7] Throughout the course of the novel Clarissa does not meet Septimus. Clarissa's reality is vastly different from that of Septimus; his presence in London is unknown to Clarissa until his death becomes idle chat at her party. By never having these characters meet, Woolf is suggesting that mental illness can be contained to the individuals who suffer from it without others who remain unaffected ever having to witness it.^[8] This allows Woolf to weave her criticism of the treatment of the mentally ill with her larger argument, which is the criticism of society's class structure. Her use of Septimus as the stereotypically traumatized man from the war is her way of showing that there were still reminders of the First World War in 1923 London.^[7] These ripples affect Mrs. Dalloway and readers spanning generations. Shell shock or post traumatic stress disorder is an important addition to the early 20th century canon of post-war British Literature.^[9]
There are similarities in Septimus' condition to Woolf's struggles with bipolar disorder (they both hallucinate that birds sing in Greek and Woolf once attempted to throw herself out of a window as Septimus does).^[5] Woolf eventually committed suicide by drowning.
Woolf's original plan for her novel called for Clarissa to kill herself during her party. In this original version, Septimus (whom Woolf called Mrs. Dalloway's "double") did not appear at all.^[2]

Existential issues

When Peter Walsh sees a girl in the street and stalks her for half an hour, he notes that his relationship to the girl was "made up, as one makes up the better part of life." By focusing on characters' thoughts and perceptions, Woolf emphasizes the significance of private thoughts rather than concrete events in a person's life. Most of the plot in Mrs Dalloway is realizations that the characters subjectively make.^[5]
Fueled by her bout of ill health, Clarissa Dalloway is emphasized as a woman who appreciates life. Her love of party-throwing comes from a desire to bring people together and create happy moments. Her charm, according to Peter Walsh who loves her, is a sense of joie de vivre, always summarized by the sentence "There she was." She interprets Septimus Smith's death as an act of embracing life and her mood remains light even though she hears about it in the midst of the party.

Feminism

As a commentary on inter-war society, Clarissa's character highlights the role of women as the proverbial "Angel in the House" and embodies sexual and economic repression and the narcissism of bourgeois women who have never known the hunger and insecurity of working women. She keeps up with and even embraces the social expectations of the wife of a patrician politician but she is still able to express herself and find distinction in the parties she throws.^[5]
Her old friend Sally Seton, whom Clarissa admires dearly, is remembered as a great independent woman:^[5] She smoked cigars, once ran down a corridor naked to fetch her sponge-bag and made bold, unladylike statements to get a reaction from people. When Clarissa meets her in the present day, she turns out to be a perfect housewife, having married a self-made rich man and given birth to five sons.

Homosexuality

Clarissa Dalloway is strongly attracted to Sally at Bourton — 34 years later, she still considers the kiss they shared to be the happiest moment of her life. She feels about women "as men feel",^[10] but she does not recognize these feelings as signs of homosexuality.
Similarly, Septimus is haunted by the image of his dear friend Evans. Evans, his commanding officer, is described as being "undemonstrative in the company of women". The narrator describes Septimus and Evans behaving together like "two dogs playing on a hearth-rug" who, inseparable, "had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other..." Jean E. Kennard notes that the word "share" could easily be read in a Forsteran manner, perhaps as in Forster's Maurice which shows the word's use in this period to describe homosexual relations. Kennard is one to note Septimus' "increasing revulsion at the idea of heterosexual sex", abstaining from sex with Rezia and feeling that "the business of copulation was filth to him before the end."^[11]

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