Category: 2021 Blog Posts

Secondary Sources & Theoretical Works 

1. Cox, Carole. “Children’s Films: The Literature Connection.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 3, 1982, pp. 10–13, doi:10.1353/chq.0.0663. 

 

1. Dens, Nathalie, et al. “DO YOU LIKE WHAT YOU RECOGNIZE? The Effects of Brand Placement Prominence and Movie Plot Connection on Brand Attitude as Mediated by Recognition.” Journal of Advertising, vol. 41, no. 3, M. E. Sharpe, Inc, 2012, pp. 35–53, doi:10.2753/JOA0091-3367410303. 

 

1. Hudson, Simon, et al. “Meet the Parents: A Parents’ Perspective on Product Placement in Children’s Films.” Journal of Business Ethics, vol. 80, no. 2, Springer, 2008, pp. 289–304, doi:10.1007/s10551-007-9421-5. 

 

1. Goldstein, Adam O., et al. “Tobacco and Alcohol Use in G-Rated Children’s Animated Films.” JAMA : the Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 281, no. 12, American Medical Association, 1999, pp. 1131–36, doi:10.1001/jama.281.12.1131. 

 

1. González, María Pilar León, et al. “Associations Between Media Representations of Physical, Personality, and Social Attributes by Gender: A Content Analysis of Children’s Animated Film Characters.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 14, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, Annenberg Press, 2020, pp. 6026–48. 

 

1. Smith, Susan, et al. Toy Story : How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, doi:10.5040/9781501324949.

 

Zurcher, Jessica D., et al. “The Portrayal of Families Across Generations in Disney Animated Films.” Social Sciences (Basel), vol. 7, no. 3, MDPI AG, 2018, p. 47–, doi:10.3390/socsci7030047.

 

Neupert, Richard. John Lasseter. University of Illinois Press, 2016.

 

Gillam, Ken, and Shannon R. Wooden. “Post-Princess Models of Gender: The New Man in Disney/Pixar.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 2–8. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3200/JPFT.36.1.2-8.

 

Ackerman, Alan. “The Spirit of Toys: Resurrection and Redemption in Toy Story and Toy Story 2.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 4, 2005, pp. 895–912. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/utq.2005.0266.

 

Towbin, Mia Adessa, et al. “Images of Gender, Race, Age, and Sexual Orientation in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, vol. 15, no. 4, 2003, pp. 19–44. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1300/J086v15n04-02. 

 

Garlen, Julie C., and Jennifer A. Sandlin. “Happily (N)Ever After: The Cruel Optimism of Disney’s Romantic Ideal.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 17, no. 6, Dec. 2017, pp. 957–971. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1338305. 

 

Fraustino, Lisa Rowe. “‘Nearly Everybody Gets Twitterpated’: The Disney Version of Mothering.” Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 2, June 2015, pp. 127–144. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s10583-015-9250-6. 

 

Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R., and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo. “‘Look Out New World, Here We Come’?: Race, Racialization, and Sexuality in Four Children’s Animated Films by Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks.” Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, vol. 9, no. 2, SAGE Publications, 2009, pp. 166–78, doi:10.1177/1532708608325937. 

 

Tenzek, Kelly E., and Bonnie M. Nickels. “End-of-Life in Disney and Pixar Films: An Opportunity for Engaging in Difficult Conversation.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, vol. 80, no. 1, SAGE Publications, 2019, pp. 49–68, doi:10.1177/0030222817726258. 

 

Camodeca, Gina. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: The Politics of Ownership in Disney’s Toy Story.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 25, no. 2, 2002, p. 51–. 

 

Smith, Becky L. “What Disney Teaches Our Children about Leadership.” Popular Culture Review, vol. 10, no. 2, Aug. 1999, pp. 79–87. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mlf&AN=1999074868&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

 

Academic Journal 

Zurcher, Jessica D., et al. “The Portrayal of Families Across Generations in Disney Animated Films.” Social Sciences (Basel), vol. 7, no. 3, MDPI AG, 2018, p. 47–, doi:10.3390/socsci7030047. 

Garlen, Julie C., and Jennifer A. Sandlin. “Happily (N)Ever After: The Cruel Optimism of Disney’s Romantic Ideal.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 17, no. 6, Dec. 2017, pp. 957–971. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1338305. 

 

Towbin, Mia Adessa, et al. “Images of Gender, Race, Age, and Sexual Orientation in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, vol. 15, no. 4, 2004, pp. 19–44, doi:10.1300/J086v15n04_02.

 

Primary Texts 

Docter, Pete, and Del Carmen, Ronnie. “Inside Out Original Story.” Script Slug, Walt Disney Studios, 19 June 2015, https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/scripts/inside-out-2015.pdf. 

 

Bird, Brad. “Ratatouille.” Script Slug, Walt Disney Studios, 2007, https://www.scriptslug.com/assets/scripts/ratatouille-2007.pdf. 

 

 

Keywords & Key Terms 

• Product Placement 
• Screenwriting/Screenplays
• Children’s Animated Films 
• Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks
• Animated Film Characters
• Subliminal Messaging
• Family, class, sexuality

 

I knew that I was interested in writing my thesis about a topic related to American cinema, but I didn’t know anything more specific than that. I am interested in screenwriting, cinematography, and film adaptations. I also kept in mind my favorite genres which are horror, trillers, and documentaries. The first question I looked into was the “connection between film and literature”. From here, there were some sources about film adaptations and I saw some about the representation of trauma in film which piqued my interest. When I searched trauma in film, most of the sources mentioned the films people are first introduced to—animated children’s films. Naturally, production companies like Pixar, Disney, and DreamWorks were also mentioned. I focused on Pixar the most, out of personal interest. I have a handful of sources that I did not include in my secondary sources section, but I think could be useful to me. I am still not entirely sure if I want to stick to a topic within animated children’s films, just because I love documentaries and I feel like I want to research more about their production before I commit to this film genre. What I like about children’s animated films is that I would explore how they influence young audiences: how the films represent family, class, and sexuality. Also, how the young viewers are taken advantage of with things like product placement and subliminal messaging. What interests me about these movies are things adults notice but kids cannot see, and possibly vice versa.

 

10/25/21: With introducing primary texts to this list, I knew I had to make a decision about which movies to write about. My biggest issue here was that I planned to focus on the early 2000s movies I grew up with, but in more recent years those movies released may have more content pertaining to my topic. However, I haven’t seen those movies (yet): Inside Out, Soul, Coco, Moana. The first thing I did was make a list of my favorite animated movies and/or movies I think I should look into more: Trolls (DreamWorks), Madagascar (DreamWorks), Spirit (DreamWorks), Brother Bear (Disney), Monsters Inc. (Pixar), Finding Nemo (Pixar), Soul (Pixar), Inside Out (Pixar), Coco (Pixar), Ratatouille (Pixar), Moana (Disney), and Ice Age (DreamWorks). After I thought of my favorite movies, I looked into who made them, I did this informally on Google and noted their names. Two names seemed most prominent (Ken Miyamoto and John Lasseter—who is a familiar name to me). From here, I searched for the screenplays online. Most are tricky to find, especially for free, but I found some. I also searched screenwriting themes and rules that those who work for Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks follow. I am still unsure if my primary sources will be the films themselves or their screenplays, though I will most likely end up utilizing both. I also thought of the question: how are animals used to present human stereotypes? I didn’t end up grabbing any sources from here, but I did look around on the Film Literature Index from JumpStart.

One of the sources I am interested in exploring further is a book written by Susan Smith, Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature (2018). Pixar, the world-renowned production company, was founded in 1986 in California. Toy Story was the first release, coming out in 1995. Other timeless animated films like “A Bug’s Life”, “Monsters, Inc.”, and “Finding Nemo” were produced prior to Disney acquiring the company for approximately $7.4 billion in 2006. Susan Smith is a senior lecturer and professor of film studies at the University of Sunderland in England. She has been teaching there for almost twenty-five years, since 1998. Most of her work centers around Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Her most successful work about Hitchcock is her book Hitchcock: Suspense, Humour, and Tone (2000). She is also the author of the chapter “Hitchcock as Saboteur”, co-authoring the book Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays (1999) with Richard Allen and Ishii Gonzales. She has a plethora of articles about Hitchcock, her most successful being “Cineaction (1999)- The Spatial World of Hitchcock’s Films”. As her time at the University of Sunderland has gone on, she has shifted her focus to animated film and musicals.

From my reading list, I was examining what the critical conversation was around Henry Jenkins’ book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Combine. The term ‘convergence culture’ had effectively entered the critical sphere of media studies as an important one to talk about the evolution of media, as Jenkins puts it in the original book: “By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the
migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” (Jenkins, Convergence Culture 2)
Jenkins later responded to his own book in the form of an academic essay in 2011, examining the impact of the term ‘convergence culture’. He then again, responded to it in a follow up to this follow up in 2014 in another essay titled “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture.’” I find this follow-up to a follow-up piece interesting because it examines a key flaw in media studies scholarship: scholarship cannot keep up with the rapid changing of media and accurately predict the future of media. “Meanwhile, the reality is shifting underneath our feet, and new scholarly work has probably been completed and is inthe
process of being published that may well change our perspectives, and each of
us continue probing deeper into the issues we are exploring here. The difficulty of such back-and-forth scholarly exchanges through print already indicates why I value the faster, more fluid, and more open exchanges that are possible through digital media.” (Jenkins, Rethinking 275)

Jenkins points out something useful here his book doesn’t do a good job of addressing, by virtue of how scholarship and book research works in media studies his discourse while widely engaged with, was behind by the time critics responded to it because of the shifts in culture that occurred after publishing. He cites the example of how his works have addressed things like the Iranian uprising, but failed to predict the Arab Spring revolution of 2011 to point out how unpredictable media and cultural shifts can be (Jenkins, Rethinking 276).

This is useful for me to think about how rapidly media studies evolves as a field because of the nature of what it works with. Many of the things I am discussing or willing to discuss critically are rapidly changing before discourse can catch up to it, and I have to adapt accordingly. Even critics who define aspects of the field such as Jenkins are not always going to be 100% reliable in explaining an issue as it develops, or have an answer to an issue that changes almost completely by the time I am examining it in the present day.

Jenkins, Henry, 1958-. Convergence Culture : Where Old and New Media Collide. New York :New York University Press, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/Culture.’” Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, Mar. 2014, pp. 267–297. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/09502386.2013.801579.

This is a poster that was released during the Second World War, to promote the conservation of food amongst American citizens. This image depicts a family at a dinner table surrounded by food, some vegetables, fruit, a salt and pepper shaker, and the focal point being a roasted turkey. The table is set with glassware and decorated cleanly with white tablecloths and napkins, but most importantly, the people sitting at that table are White. The image that the government puts forth to remind citizens and soldiers what they are fighting for is a white family dining together. This obvious lack of representation of other racial and ethnic groups in the United States is highlighted in this image and promotes a singular model of a “typical” American family. This poster does not only have racial implications, but also socioeconomic impacts. The poster displays a large family, but they are all well-dressed and all have access to a plentiful amount of food and expensive-looking dishes. This poster leaves out the many individuals in the United States at that time, whose norm did not include access to the resources that the family in this poster have. Lastly, the grandmother is serving the food at the dining table, while the grandfather is standing at the head of the table observing her and the food. This further adds to the descriptions of image of a family of American citizens that the government out forth: white, wealthy, and patriarchal.  

The food featured in this poster is essential to note as well. The dinner does not include any other cultural or ethnic cuisine, simply a roasted turkey, Jell-O, and produce. The lack of variety of food in this poster causes an aversion to any food that does not fit in this picture that the United States’ government framed to be American. This poster paints a picture of what the United States government imagined its citizens to be, which has large and negative impacts on the individuals who do not look like the family in the poster and do not cook the same types of food as them. While this poster was created or proliferated in the 1940s, it acts as a proxy of how the United States approached the topic of food and decided what was normal and what was not. The absence of individuals and foods from different racial and ethnic groups reveals their erasure within the culinary discussion and offers an outlook on what struggles American people of color had to endure within publishing culinary literature or their overall relationship to food. One impact that this poster could have is a rejection or aversion to one’s culture and cultural foods because propaganda portrayed a specific image, to avoid not fitting within societal norms surrounding cuisine and one’s participation within a private space. By highlighting who and what was featured and accepted in American public discourse, can reveal the voices and cultures that are left out, which relates to my research surrounding Americans of various ethnicities and races, and their participation in literature through the lens and focus of food and cooking.  

Freedom From Want; 1941-1945; Records of the Office of Government Reports, Record Group 44. [Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/freedom-from-want, October 13, 2021] 

The Medieval Romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was published in the 14th century. Over six hundred years later, the film The Green Knight starring Dev Patel was released in 2021.
The movie has many differences in plot and tone. Not only does it add characters and extra storylines, it even changes the ending.
In the original text, the setting is told as a merry celebration in King Arthur’s court in Camelot. Arthur himself is described as so merry he was almost like a child. Guinevere is described in a similarly cheerful manner, as beautiful and finely dressed. While the movie still begins in Camelot, the colors and dull and cold, and Arthur, as well as Guinevere, look tired and old. Additionally, there is an added introductory scene that introduces Gawain instead of having him enter the story after the other nobles. We also see eerie scenes of Gawain’s mother practicing pagan ceremonies with her daughters in conjunction with the arrival of the Green Knight (in the original text, this is performed by Gawain’s aunt).
As the plot continues forwards, the catalyst of the plot remains the same: a Green Knight enters the court (although in the film he is literally made of green flora, and the sounds of his movements are replaced by the sounds of trees creaking and branches snapping) and challenges the boldest knight in the company to a game wherein the knight may strike a blow against the green figure and in one year’s time, that knight must find the Green Knight to be dealt a blow of equal strength and placement on their body. And as in the original tale, Gawain volunteers to play the mysterious knight’s game, severing the Green Knight’s head completely from his body, whereupon the Green Knight picks up his head, unharmed, and reminds Gawain of the deal before leaving while cackling.
However, things diverge from the original text when a year passes and Gawain must travel to meet the Green Knight. The film adds in one or two more quests that Gawain must go through before finding the Green Knight. Only the last is mentioned in the book, wherein Gawain stays with a man in his castle and receives food in exchange for anything he is able to receive in the manor. However, in the original text, it is revealed that the Green Knight is the same man who took him in, but he was made to look like the Green Knight by Morgan le Faye in order to trick the entire court at Camelot. The Green knight feigns two blows, but Gawain is eventually given a nick on his neck and sent on his way instead of having his head cut off. Even though he feels shame, he still returns to Camelot and his fellow knights support him. However, in the film adaptation, Gawain meets with the Green Knight and he is the one who flinches twice before accepting his fate. Before his death, he sees what could be if he runs away from the ax he faces. However, he decides that he is finally ready to die. Then the Green Knight congratulates him and tells him that he is an honorable knight. Then the Green Knight raises his ax and aims for Gawain’s neck. But then the screen cuts to black as we hear the sound of the ax landing and this ends the film without confirming or denying whether Gawain lived or died.
The themes of honor that pervade the original text are present in the film adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the 2021 version has a twist to its view of honor. Gawain is constantly questioning himself in this version and is far from the knight in shining armor that the original Sir Gawain was. This Gawain sleeps with prostitutes, runs from danger, and can be selfish to the point of ruining other people’s lives. Thus, it makes sense that these two versions of the same character have two different endings. Even with these different endings, these films both contain commentary on aspects of their contemporary societies. So, despite all these changes, I still believe that the 2021 film encompasses the style and structure of English Medieval romances quite well as the knightly protagonist struggles through trials of the mind and body to achieve some form of understanding or growth.

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – York University.” Translated by W.A. Neilson, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, York University, 1999, www.yorku.ca/inpar/sggk_neilson.pdf.

The Green Knight. Directed by David Lowery, Ley Line Entertainment, Bron Creative, Wild Atlantic Pictures, Sailor Bear, 2021.

The Writer Ocean Vuong was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1988; his family immigrated to Hartford, Connecticut in 1990. His mother was a hapa woman, a daughter of a Vietnamese farm girl and an American G.I during the American war in Vietnam. In the US, his mother became a worker in a nail salon, in which he was substantially raised: his mother was the breadwinner of the house, providing for a household of herself, Vuong, his grandma, and his brother on a 12k salary, yes 12k—Vuong revealed this fact in a recent interview, and even him himself was still amazed at how she managed to raise a family on such an income. She carried the burden, the bodily toll of a physically toxic working condition, which eventually led to her cancer and her death at 51, so that Vuong can have the “luxury” (luxury relative to what she did, in Vuong’s words) of reading, of writing, of literature.

Regarding his educational formation, he first dropped out of business school because it was no place for a poet—he enrolled instead at Brooklyn College and graduated with a B.A. in 19^th century American Poetry. He went on to receive an MFA in Poetry from NYU. He has won numerous prestigious literary prizes for his debuts in two genres: a poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and a novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous—he is also a MacArthur fellow.

Both Night Sky and On Earth are autobiographical; the latter is often categorized as “autofiction,” autobiographical fiction. In his poetry collection, Vuong explores, as Li-Young Lee describes, “his obsessions [with] love, family, violence, the sacred, the erotic, maleness and femininity”, and these are the same subjects he returns to in his novel, and again and again in the futurity of his art. On Earth tells a story that is very close to Vuong’s life, in terms of the setting of his growing-up places, of the condition of life he found himself in, of the matrilineage in Vuong’s family; even the narrator’s mother bears the name of his real mother.

In her CNN interview with Vuong, the journalist Michel Martin, when talking about his poems, does not refer to the speaker of the poem but to Vuong directly, equating him to the speaker–he does not correct her. Somewhere (I am certain, but don’t recall exactly where) Vuong has declared that he has rewritten his poetry collection in the form of a novel, i.e. On Earth. “You don’t need to reinvent yourself,” Vuong said, critiquing the literary tradition of America, imbued with the capitalistic mode of constantly having to reinvent oneself, having something new to say in a second book—for Vuong, it was always about “privileging inexhaustible questions.” In his encounters with renowned Asian American writers (he didn’t name who), Vuong saw these writers’ condescension in their self-proclaimed surpassing beyond the “immigrant novel,” beyond writing about the diaspora, to writing about space and science fiction, so as to successfully extricate themselves from the white gaze/expectations, but as Vuong argues, their art would still be reacting to whiteness in their spite to remove itself from it.

“I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’” the writer-narrator of On Earth says of his art and his family, “but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work” (175). This is no doubt also Vuong’s intentionality and vision as he insists on again and again, in public and in the construction of his work, the perennial and inexhaustible questions grounded in his body and the bodies of his familial genealogy.

Sources:

1, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OZIwsk9cAM

2, https://lithub.com/three-takeaways-from-ocean-vuongs-wonderful-conversation-with-alexander-chee/

3, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSoRF61n0ZQ

4, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/10/ocean-vuongs-life-sentences

I’m writing a biography about Daphne du Maurier because I really enjoyed her novel Rebecca, which I read a few years ago.  It’s so rich with complex questions about gender, personal relationships, identity and the self.  I’m considering using this as my primary text perhaps alongside another one of her works, such as The Scapegoat or My Cousin Rachel.  I’m trying to work through these other primary texts to help me decide.

Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907 in Regent’s Park, London to an actress and actor-manager, growing up surrounded by art and theater.  With their governesses, she grew up with her two sisters “bound together in a world of the imagination, stories and fantasy”, which greatly influenced her creative career (“Daphne”).  Her works often depict romantic narratives set in the wild coast of Cornwall, a place she developed an intense passion for due to years spent at their country home during family holidays (“Daphne”).  While her work is often classified as romance, she is considered “‘the mistress of suspense’” and much of her works illustrate gothic undertones (“Daphne du”).  Maurier met her husband Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Browning when he sailed to London to meet her after reading her debut novel The Loving Spirit; they were married for 33 years(“Daphne du”).  Allegedly, their marriage dealt with difficulties “because of Daphne du Maurier’s secret bisexuality however she denied this fact” (“Daphne du”).  Questions in her own sexuality could perhaps coincide with Maurier’s continuous emphasis on the identity and the self in her works.  She often wrote about marital problems and the type of psychological stress that caused.  Rebecca, written in 1938, was inspired by the marital difficulties she faced with Browning during the war as a wife of an active member of the military; much like the protagonist of Rebecca, Maurier felt jealous of her husband’s former fiancée while living there in Egypt (“Daphne”).  Additionally, she had a difficult relationship with her father, which publicly arose in her biography of him entitled Gerald: A Portrait (“Daphne”).  Daphne du Maurier’s literary talents spanned a wide variety as she wrote novels, short stories, biographies, and plays.  She had three children with Frederick Browning and died in Cornwall in 1989 at the age of 81.

“Daphne du Maurier.” British Library, https://www.bl.uk/people/daphne-du-maurier.

“Daphne du Maurier.” Famous Authors, https://www.famousauthors.org/daphne-du-maurier.

James Baldwin’s relationship with his stepfather informs his work, and his life, by complicating his experience, comprehension, and analysis of Black masculinity. 

 James Baldwin was raised in Harlem with his mother and his stepfather, David Baldwin. James was the eldest son out of nine children. In his biographical article about Baldwin titled “The Enemy Within”, Hilton Als situates Baldwin tightly around his stepfather, marking David’s existence as essential to understanding James. As he moves through James Baldwin’s development as a writer and as a man, he continuously nods back to David Baldwin. “By 1948, he was no longer the ugliest boy his father had ever seen but a promising young writer who was considered very smart by the older editors he worked for” (Als). Even in marking Baldwin’s success, Baldwin biography roots James in David Baldwin. 

Baldwin reaffirms Als’ negative characterization of David most notably in Notes of a Native Son, which begins with David’s death. Upon reflection, he writes, “I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home” (Notes of a Native Son 65). He expresses both resentment for and unfamiliarity with his stepfather. However, as James grew as a writer and man, he began to see the roots of David’s bitterness as having “had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black— with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness, but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life” (Notes of a Native Son 64). James acknowledges that David’s struggles were due to his identity as a Black man. Being his paternal figure, this inevitably confused and frustrated James’ own conceptualization of Black masculinity.  

Baldwin explores this confusion and frustration through Black male characters in his fiction. Go Tell It on the Mountain is directly reflective of James and David. In the novel, the father character, Gabriel, is identical to David Baldwin. Gabriel was a preacher, as was David. Further, the novel circulates around Gabriel’s intense, familial, and religious bitterness. Baldwin writes that his stepfather “hat[ed] and fear[ed] every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him” (“Notes of a Native Son” 66). In a similar tone, Gabriel tells John that “white people were never to be trusted, and that they told nothing but lies-he, John- would find out as soon as got a little older, how evil white people could be” (Go Tell It on the Mountain 34). David Baldwin, and his bruised Black masculinity, informs Baldwin’s work in fiction. 

In his essay titled “Nobody Knows My Name”, James reflects on a trip to the South. He writes about the potency of Southern racism against the Black men: “How many times has the Southern day come up to find that black man, sexless, hanging from a tree!” (“Nobody Knows My Name” 204). More directly, he recounts his own experience while in Atlanta, specifically with an old Black man who directed him onto his first-ever segregated bus. This man enchanted James. “His eyes seemed to say that what I was feeling he had been feeling, at much higher pressure, all his life. But my eyes would never see the hell his eyes had seen. And this hell was, simply, that he had never in his life owned anything, not his wife, not his house, not his child, which could not, at any instant, be taken from him by the power of white people…And for the rest of the time that I was in the South I watched the eyes of old black men” (“Nobody Knows My Name” 204-205). In this essay, Baldwin observes the Black man’s struggle with his own masculinity, describing his hell as having not ever been able to own anything. This struggle fascinates and saddens Baldwin. A physical reflection of both James and David, this older Black man served as a reminder for James of the realities of Black masculinity throughout recent generations— a consistent struggle with identity. As is evident in his work, his fascination resided here. 

After some initial biographical research on the life of Virginia Woolf, who is one of my options for primary texts, it became clear that she had grown up with a fascination for natural history and the taxonomic ecology of the time. In his biography of her, Nigel Nicholson mentions that, “Virginia Woolf was a keen hunter of butterflies and moths. With her brothers and sister she would smear tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects, and then pin their lifelike corpses to cork boards, their wings outspread.” Later, with the transition in scientific thought, Woolf’s eco-consciousness shifted as well to reflect a culture turning away from taxonomic classification to holistic ecology (Alt). This consciousness of the natural world comes through in her writings, as well as an emphasis on space/place as a whole. The historical context in which Woolf was writing also contributes to her feminist writings, with the growing suffrage movement and her interactions with “radical” feminists throughout her education at King’s College. 

Woolf’s childhood also greatly informs her passion for the natural world. She grew up summering in natural locations in England, when her family wanted to get away from Kensington. For example, since she was born in 1895, her family would summer in St. Ives in Cornwall, a retreat from city life and the blooming industrialization and modernization of the turn of the century (“Virginia Woolf”). These early memories of the pastoral escape and summers by the sea informed her later novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf experienced a long list of childhood traumatic events, from losing a parent, dealing with deadly infectious diseases, and sexual assault from her two half-brothers. These tragedies within the home and struggles with mental health may also contribute to her interest in writing and the outside/natural world as a place of literary imagination and perhaps safety. 

Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 2010, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762178. https://dickinson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01DICKINSON_INST/1d86qtd/cdi_proquest_ebookcentral_EBC554749  

Nicolson, Nigel. “Virginia Woolf.” The New York Times: on the Web, The New York Times, 2000, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/n/nicolson-woolf.html?scp=4&sq=virginia%2520woolf&st=cse.  

“Virginia Woolf.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 27 Mar. 2020, www.biography.com/writer/virginia-woolf.