Accepting Masks In Emily Dickinson's They Wear The Mask

In urban America, a resounding ground note fear of settling carries the tune of many people’s existence. There is a notion that an upgrade or an improvement in their circumstances be it financial, emotional, or social, is just around the corner. These people, the paranoid pursuers of the ever-elusive success, are rather rare breeds. They question the questionnaires and don’t take no for an answer. What, then, is the harm in accepting circumstances? On the one hand, if those circumstances are emotionally or physically comprising any kind of delay in seeking a change will be harmful to the person. That’s fairly standard. More insidiously are the patterns society instills in players by inspirations. Therefore, the danger in accepting circumstances and not questioning them is the stultification of one’s personality and potential. In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” the idea of emotional suppression comes to the forefront of the conversation. Despite their smiles and song, humans are racked with pain and misery beneath their acculturated …show more content…
Who Are You?” praises the notion of counterculture. She asks the society of self-aggrandizing sufferers why they don’t recognize the beauty in anonymity? These people are amphibian with their constant name croaking, as she compares the public to that of a frog in swamp. That unsightly swamp, heated and damp, retains the fame of the public for as long as the summer month of June. She is not immune to finding her identity in another, however, as her poem calls out to find a like-minded individual. However autobiographical Dickinson’s writing may have been, she rejects the busybody culture of society, the glitz and the glam, though she longs for an alliance with a person who shares her worldview. This, perhaps, is an extension of Dunbar’s writing, with Dickinson desperately wanting another man or woman to remove their mask and look her in the