Choose three of the following five questions/topics to write about. Your goal here is to show me how much you’ve learned about the texts we’ve read in class. Try to budget your time. Keep your handwriting as legible as possible. Be sure to check for errors. N.B. for this assignment, limit your discussion to the following writers: Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Robert Frost.
1.“Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,/ The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.” – – Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Explain how Whitman defines freedom in “Song of Myself” – – freedom from what, the path to freedom, freedom to do what? Compare this definition to at least one other of the five writers under discussion (see above).
2. “ . . . I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” – – Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
What exactly is Douglass getting at with his distinction between “slave in form” and “slave in fact”? Use this distinction to explain the situation of Gilman’s narrator or the central character in Dickinson’s poems.
3. “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.” – – Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
The house is a physical location but also a social and cultural space. Explain the way(s) the house is organized in social and cultural terms in at least two writers under discussion. (At least one of these writers must be female.)
4. “They shut me up in Prose —
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet” – – Emily Dickinson, 613
What is Dickinson’s argument about prose (and poetry)? Can you explain how this argument applies (or doesn’t apply) to at least one of our other five writers?
5. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” – – Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Frost’s poem makes some provocative arguments about choice and agency (i.e. the power to determine the course of one’s life). Explain these arguments. Explain how at least one other writer under discussion might agree or disagree with Frost’s arguments about the power of the self to determine its own course.