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Example research essay topic: Racial Stereotypes Robert Hayden - 1,621 words

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John Hatcher Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves portrays Hayden's own mythological figure of resilience... Hayden uses the figure of Jemima as an archetypal symbol of the displaced Afro-American identity. The womans lengthy narrative recounts her adventures from her days as the Sepia High Stepper in Europe, to her present status in a sideshow as a fake mammy to Gods mistakes. As he listens to her intriguing narrative of High-stepping days, the persona finds in her a beautiful image of survival and strength, in spite of her unfinished or fake identity born from the original displacement of the culture from From The Auroral Darkness: The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden.

Copyright? 1984 by John Hatcher. Fred M. Fellow Originally little more than a fragment, a brief section of a poem entitled " From the Coney Island Suite" published in Figure of Time (1955), the final version in Words derives as much from the idea-theme of that fragment as it does from a real model for its central personage. Hayden called the original brief segment " Congress of Freaks. " In it, he lists the " cast" of a Coney Island carnival sideshow (the " Unique Original Jemima / and Kokimo the Dixie Dancing Fool... The snake-skinned man. / the boy with elephant face" ) and protests the " perverted logic" that makes confederates of physical freaks and racial stereotypes. The speaker disdains further consideration of the scene and turns away, " weary of this stale American joke. " In its more modern rendering, similar elements of setting, character, and authorial tone are almost entirely recast to emphasize character study and an empathetic understanding of the character.

Aunt Jemima remains, and then some. She still wears the mask of outrageous racial stereotyping, and, as the introductory narrator realizes, is " enacting someones notion of themselves / (and me). " Hayden, as this " new" narrator, again ponders the logic that groups together carnival freaks, blackface parodies, and himself, but this time he identifies more tolerantly, recognizing their roles as survival strategies: " Poor devils have to live somehow. " After introducing Aunt Jemima (and himself) in those terms, the poet-speaker initiates the real portrait of this " heroine" through a subsequent encounter and dialogue between them on the Coney Island beach. By then out of her costume and role as Aunt Jemima, the woman, " her blue-rinsed hair / without the red bandana now, " asks the narrator for a light, and soon explains that she spoke to him because he reminded her of a " friend" she once had. The dialogue quickly gives way to her monologue of reminiscence, wherein she recounts her life, love, and career. Although her rambling discourse shows that she is totally self-aware of the irony in her present status, her account of how she arrived at this juncture is devoid of a sense of special self-merit for having endured.

Therein lies the strength and subtlety of Hayden's portrait of her as an intriguing individual, and as an admired type. The detail of her autobiographical monologue illustrates these features of her portrayal. Gazing beyond the breakers toward the open sea, she recalls crossing the ocean long ago to " play" the major European capitals, billed as " The Sepia High Stepper, " when " Crowned heads applauded me. " With the world at her dancing feet, she found love to complement her fame and riches. But that " sweetest gentleman" was killed in World War I, and her " high-stepping" life ended with his. Reduced to survival tactics, she adopted another role, " Mystery From / The Mystic East, " reading palms and minds, " and telling suckers how to get / stolen rings and sweethearts back. " But a night visit from the ghost of her dead lover aborts this " career" ; in her reckoning, he " without a single word" silently warned her: " Baby, quit playing with spiritual stuff. " So she ended up with the sideshow, a " fake mammy to Gods mistakes, " in her phrasing, in her recognition of lifes ironies. Hayden closes the poem with a combination of direct narrative commentary and impressionistic figuration a combination that extends the psychological portrait of this particular " Aunt Jemima" and suggests her racial and human significance.

The narrators response to her bemusement at her present self-deprecatory role in life reveals his understanding of her need both to shield and to mock herself. Her endurance depends on that detached perspective, that protective posture. The poet-speaker finds something noble in her self-sufficiency. The conjunction of her real person, her adopted role, and the ocean-resort locale brings to his mind " an antique etching" of " The Sable Venus, " which he remembers " naked on / a baroque Cellini shell, " a portrait he imagines symbolically equivalent to his romanticized vision of Aunt Jemima: " voluptuous imago floating in the wake / of slave-ships on fantastic seas. " Of course neither the narrator-listener nor the poems reader can be certain that Aunt Jemima's life story is not just another false image like the " sexual glitter" and " oppressive fun" of the beach carnival. The narrator rightly discerns that her laughter " shields" and " mocks" both herself and those enraptured by her story.

Hayden jerks himself and the reader back from the " Sable Venus" reverie with a concluding balance between empathy and mere tolerance. Jemima has the last word; she sighs as she rises from the beach sand to return to her disguised life, but she takes her leave with the wisecracking attitude symptomatic of her resilient ability to cope: " Dont you take no wooden nickels, hear? / Tin dimes neither. So long, pal. " As Hayden surely and carefully planned it, Aunt Jemima lingers in the readers mind, an heroic figure regardless of whether she is wooden nickel, tin dime, or a true " Sable Venus. " From Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

Copyright? 1984 by G. K. Hall & Company. Reprinted with permission of the author. Pontheolla T. Williams The idea of the " deformed" or monstrous reappears in " Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves. " The central concern in the poem is protest against racial stereotypes those directed especially against the black woman.

However, in protesting the Aunt Jemima and black clown stereotypes, the speaker wonders about the logic that makes of them (and me) confederates of The Spider Girl, The Snake-skinned Man. It is the refusal of the shows producer and the audience to accept the black entertainers except as one of a kind with the " Spider Girl" and the " Snake-skinned Man" that provokes the speakers " wonder. " Moreover, his wonderment is intensified by his realization that he, too, is regarded as a freak. As the Zulu king and the Sambo stereotypes erroneously define the black man, so does the Aunt Jemima stereotype erroneously define the black woman, a characterization that reveals she is likewise an avatar of the black mammy stereotypes symbol of the antebellum surrogate mother whom Stephen Vincent Ben? t so accurately described in John Browse Body.

This character is the key persona in the poem in that she helps to develop the dramatic structure that rests on a dialogue that she holds with the speaker. She is the female half of an entertainment duo on Coney Island. After watching her and " Kokimo the Dixie Dancing Fool" do a " bally for the freak show, " the speaker moves on to the beach, where he ponders their " psychic joke. " On the beach he encounters the unmasked Aunt Jemima. Without her kerchief and free of her clown role, she regales him with her life story because he reminds her so much of a former boyfriend. In an account that is reminiscent of Josephine Bakers life, she reveals that at the zenith of her career she, too, had danced before kings. Now suffering misfortunes that include loss of fame, fortune, and her lover, she has become " fake mammy to Gods mistakes. " These " mistakes" are, we have seen, " Spider Girl" and the " Snake-skinned Man. " Moreover, by extension, these " mistakes" also include the speaker, who, of course, is reckless in the poem and who believes he is their " confederate. " Hence, we may well speculate on the nature of the speakers aberration.

Is this an aberration that defines him elsewhere in these poems as a " deformed homunculus" deformed because he suffers a " psychic joke, " a joke that we have learned he perceives his bisexuality to be? We can be certain that the decision to make the speaker a " confederate" of " Spider Girl" and the " Snake-skinned Man" is deliberate. The poem is a revised version of " from The Coney Island Suite, " which first appeared in Figure of Time. In the early version the question is asked: By what perverted logic they are made confederates of the Snake-skinned man, the boy with elephant face.

In " Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves" the speaker walks to the beach pondering the logic that makes of them (and me) confederates of The Spider Girl, The Snake-skinned Man. With " and thats the beauty part, " a distinctly Afro-American folk retort in recognition of exquisite irony, Aunt Jemima reevaluates her " fake mammy to Gods mistakes" role. What she means is that just as she is not really a " mammy, " likewise, her charges are not " Gods mistakes. " He does not make mistakes. From Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Copyright? 1987 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.


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Research essay sample on Racial Stereotypes Robert Hayden

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