The Woman Warrior

I did not particularly enjoy reading this text. I was rather confused with the episodes in the book and had to keep going back and forth to determine which scene came before which, and this was very time consuming. However, I did enjoy the story because being from an Indian family, I can relate to a Chinese American as some of our cultural values are similar. However, in Indian society, women are not supposed to be warriors, an option apparently possible in Chinese culture. I had trouble with the fact that the Fa Mu Lan was not recognized as having an identity until she went away from home, protected her people, fought with men and won, and came back and became submissive to her husband again. She tells her in-laws that she is now a wife and mother and a daughter-in-law and will assume her role as one. How can she forget the woman warrior part of herself? I would imagine that it was extremely difficult for a woman to accomplish what she did, and then go back home to become submissive to the demands of a domestic wife. Therefore, was she really a “woman warrior”? She did not fight off the constraints society put on her.

Madonna/Whore

In he “Introduction” to Feminist Paradigms, Rivkin and Ryan list the various movements of feminism. There exist new and old notions of feminism. One of the goals of feminism was to redefine the Madonna/Whore complex, in which women are seen as virgins and therefore angelic, or they are seen as whores; there is no in-between. This aspect however, is still seen today. While reading this, it reminded me of one of the episodes of Sex and the City. Charlotte’s husband, Trey is unable to perform in the bedroom and Charlotte cannot figure out why. At first she does not tell her friends out of embarrassment. She even becomes insecure and thinks that the reason Trey “cannot get it up” is because she is unattractive. However, when she presents this at the breakfast table with her friends, Samantha suggests that this is because she is a wife and her husband sees her as an Madonna, and is not sexually aroused. Charlotte’s attempts to be sexy for her husband fail even when she buys sexy lingerie to arouse him.

Group Presentation

In my group for The Jungle, I worked with mandy, Jason, Jeff, and Kathy. We all worked well together and conversed mainly via email as the week before our presentation was Spring Break and some of us were not close to campus. We met one time before spring break to discuss what kinds of things we could incorporate during the class discussion; we met for more than two hours! We all agreed that having just a normal discussion would be boring and wanted to do something different. Mandy suggested to play a game, at which point I suggested Jeopardy. This idea was soon deemed ineffective because playing Jeopardy would be too confusing and time consuming. Mandy suggested a courtoom scene and we all agreed on it because one of the novel’s major themes is injustice of the people within a capitalist economy.

My Contribution: I made signs (placards) for all the six categories: church, factory owners, politicians, child laborers, factory workers, and prostitutes. I also suggested that we have some food, at which point the group decided snacks with wine would be better.

Afterthoughts: Once it was almost time to present, I started getting nervous as to how effectier our courtroom scenario would be. I was glad that it went well. Everyone contributed to the discussion and it lasted for almost the entire class period. I especially appreciated my classmates following our requirement of responding to questions with quotations from the text (as evidence) rather than just from memory.

Upton Sinclair

Though I enjoyed reading the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, I wish it would not have been so long and depressing. Page after page revealed the pain and suffereing of the innocent immigrants at the hand of the system of American Capitalism. The novel could have not revealed all these details over and over again. However, there is something to be said about these details—they are probably not exaggerated. I liked the fact that most of the novel was based on true events of migrant workers in America. There are many themes in the novel that are worth discussing, especially promotion of Marxist ideals throughout. The workers have no rights; they work extensively and are not compensated well for their work. However, they continue to live in America because they would have a tough life in their native country as well. The ending of the novel is particularly Marxist since Jurgis eventually joins the commnunist party because that is the only way to get out of his struggle for life; this party has various rallies symbolizing the rising of the working class. Jurgis had tried to work as an honest man, but the system dehumanized and demoralized him. He finally went to become a part of organized crime. The varius stages of his life—his honest work, loss of Ona, loss of his child, and loss of family and finances are examples of critiques of capitalism.

The aspect I found most interesting is the fact atht people in the novel are just seen as machines—and sometimes even lower than machines. For example, repeatedly throughout the book, the language suggests that the people work for the machines, not even people. This symbolizes working classes working for the state apparatus in a capitalist economy and being completely destroyed—mind and body. The only time Jurgis was truly happy was when he lived as a nomad, not working for a machine. During this time, he also found happiness because he was cheating the system. As long as he obeyed the capitalist system, he was living in misery. Jurgis was not always the best husband/primary caregiver of the family as he abandoned Ona and the others, but it could be argued that his continual work in a capitalist society made him this way.

Communist Manifesto

Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx first outlines the problems within the society at the time. He acknowledges that the idea of communism is already prevalent in Europe, and moreover, is recognized as a power. Further, he advises all the communists to take action: “It is high time that communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies” (769). Because all the history of the world has always consisted of some type of class struggle, he proposes the solution to be a communist community. He categorizes society into the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat; the bourgeoisie being the ruling class and one with all the power and resources and the proletariat being the working class. The recent advent of capitalism and industrial revolutions around the world had destroyed society according to Marx. People merely became like machines—they input and output work. This makes them emotionally and physically detached from the product. For their work, they are paid very low wages by which they are barely able to support themselves. While the working class is not able to enjoy any of the benefits of its own work, the ruling class, never knowing what goes into a product, enjoys it. This is morally and ethically wrong for Marx. It dehumanizes the workers. Therefore, he proposes that the only way for a change would be for the working class to rise and fight for its rights. Thus, a revolution becomes necessary because the workers are otherwise not able to overpower the system or have any rights whatsoever.