Betsey Brown Post 7

One of my favorite things about reading Ntozake Shange’s adolescent novel, Betsey Brown, was her writing. The words flowed together so smoothly that I finished the book before I knew it. Her writing is absolutely poetic one of my favorite passages can be found on page 179 “Vida patted her heart and thought on her Frank, who was the last one to give her flowers so long ago. The melody of her romance waltzed through her soul: Frank and I would get together, when the music got ta playin… once I went to a roadhouse and danced on a dime… me and that handsome Frank of mine.” Shange has a lot of inner rhyming and rhyming at the end of sentences. I really liked that part of the book because not only does Shange provide imagery but she also creates a melody with her choice of words.

Another part of the book that I enjoyed was how raw yet believable it was. There have been many times in my family that it has been complete chaos in the house and how Shange wrote it, I could relate to it on many levels. Another ingenious use of words by Shange was how the Browns would sometimes forget to use proper English but they were not scolded for it until Jane came back from her absence. Just like any child and even adult every now and then we use words in the wrong tense or all together in the wrong context. All in all I thoroughly enjoyed Betsey Brown, at first I was a little shocked by the sort of obscene language used while describing the puberty and sexual scenes but I got past that and was pleasantly surprised by Shange's beautiful writing.

Paper Outline Rough Version

So here is the rough outline for my paper on adolescent literature.

Topic: The Comparison of Common Adolescent Themes found in Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple and how it can be related to the Adolescence of that time and of today

Information: Will be taken from class discussions, critical essays, from the books and from my
own personal experience with adolescence.

Questions to be answered:
What are the common themes between the two books?
What are the different themes between the two books?
What was going on during the time that these books were written?
How can these books be related to today’s adolescent?
How can these books be related to me?

I feel that this is a good starting point for the essay. Due to required reading for other classes I have unfortunately put reading Lucy Temple on the back burner. Fortunately it is not a long read so I have no doubt that I will finish it this week. From reading the introduction I found out that Lucy Temple is about three orphans and how they go through their adolescent stage. Lucy is the protagonist but I feel that I would like to touch upon the other orphans in the book; they seem to offer different aspects and personalities that could tie well with how this book could be related to today. I feel like the questions that I want to answer with my paper will provide plenty of information and will create a nice flow for the paper.

Huck Finn and Mark Twain's Approach

One of the items that stuck out to me in the back of the book was Mark Twain's own description of the adventure he found himself in when writing the Adventures of Huck Finn. I thought it was extremely interesting that before the beginning of this novel he knew that he did not want to write another boy's novel, he wanted an adult novel but one that still contained youth. He realized he could never do this with Tom Sawyer because he felt that he would have to make him older and then it would just become a lost cause. He came to the idea of writing a coming of age story or an ignorant to cultured story about one of Tom Sawyer's counterparts and he chose Huck Finn. Mark Twain's letters to his friends and editors were very insightful to the challenge that he had when he first started writing this book. He set it aside for awhile but then in a short amount of time it was completed. He seemed utterly surprised by himself for writing a vast amount of words in a single day and also working on Sundays! I also liked how he added in that throughout the book the adventure primarily lies around a raft and the Mississippi River. What made me appreciate Mark Twain’s view on his book even more was the fact that he felt so empowered by it and so sure that it was going to succeed. But he even said that if it didn’t he did not care what those critics thought he enjoyed it no matter what.

Charlotte Temple 4th Post

I know that this is super late but due to me being completely crazy when it comes to packing and getting ready to go on our softball trip everything else went out the window and then to complete this ridiculousness our hotel in Florida did not have wireless internet or any internet.

I feel that if this story would be written today many of the events would be the same. The idea of being seduced by an older man, falling in “love” and then getting pregnant and being left behind is what the Lifetime Movie network feeds off of.

I decided to write about the characters, plot, setting and description of the Charlotte Temple novel that I would write today. First of all the protagonist would be a man and his name would be Charlie Church, who is a naïve country boy from the mid-west who gets tempted by a seductress named Mandy Ville in New York City. At the club in New York City she drugs his drink and whisks him away to Paris. In Paris he is left in a hotel with no money, no identity and no sense of how he got there. Charlie Church wanders off into the French country side looking for Mandy Ville but he cannot find her. Luckily Charlie Church finds a nice country girl named Celine and she takes care of him and nurses him back to health.

I decided to change it up a bit and have a happy ending, not where one dies because of their sins. Maybe it is because I just spent a week in Florida and went to Disney that I am feeling this way.