Emotional Breakdown:
When I think of the South, the first thing that comes to my mind is country music. Artists like Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn from Country’s golden age, George Jones and Waylon Jennings from the outlaw movement, and contemporary greats like Brooks & Dunn and Alabama float around in my mind like hungry ghosts. To the outsider, it might seem that the South’s literature and it’s music are nothing alike. After all, literature and music have completely different territories. However, there is one distinct characteristic that brings these two forms of art together, emotion. Emotion might not be a uniquely Southern idea, but it certainly runs rampant in both the South’s music and it’s literature. Both musicians and writers aim …show more content…
Earley presents Peggy as a complicated and unsatisfied cancer survivor who is entrenched in melancholy. A lot of Peggy’s unhappiness is focused on her husband, Vernon, but that does not mean her voice is hateful. Peggy does not hate her husband, but merely wants her audience to understand that she is “different than” he is (80). She has serious issues with her husband, notifying her audience that she doesn’t want her husband to be “just another good man” but to be something more than that (72). She asserts a desire for an invigorating passion that she has lacked for so long. Moreover, based on all of her problems in life, her voice is one of discontent and one that is looking for sympathy and understanding from her audience. She succeeds in her attempt to gather sympathy largely due to the emotional radiance she emanates throughout the story. She shows this emotion gradually, starting from the story’s inception where she explains how she wanted to “build a house in Rutherfordton” with “noise and traffic”, but how instead she lives in a trailer in a less than ideal part of Appalachia. The story certainly helps her gather sympathy from her audience, but her real success lies in her inner commentary shortly after. She gives her audience a spectacular view of her inner feelings during her house problem with Vernon. She explains how she just “signed the papers” away without …show more content…
Rosa Coldfield from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Like the voice of Peggy, Rosa’s voice is looking for sympathy, although for her sympathy is not the main goal. Rosa’s intentions are more calculating than Peggy’s because for her sympathy is only a weapon in her arsenal. Her primary objective is revenge. This classic southern motif makes its way through the midst of the nearly incomprehensible Absalom, Absalom! through a variety of characters, but primarily through Rosa. The subject of Rosa’s revenge is Sutpen, a character she maliciously describes to Quentin as “not even a gentlemen” (9). Her hateful language for Sutpen is so strong that it even “invokes a ghost[like]” ogrish character “enclosed by its effluvium of hell” in Quentin (8). Clearly Ms. Rosa Coldfield’s desire for revenge is fiery. The method by which Rosa’s voice conveys her anger towards Sutpen is mainly through powerful description and also through a snowball effect similar to Peggy’s. Like in the example above, Ms. Rosa Coldfield consistently uses language to picture Sutpen negatively. Another example is when she describes Sutpen as a man who seemed like a “demon… who came out of nowhere…with a strange bunch of niggers” that violently tore up the land (5). Rosa’s vivid comparison of Sutpen to a demon who seemed to appear out of nowhere with strange slaves to ruin the land effectively depicts Sutpen derogatorily. She
When I think of the South, the first thing that comes to my mind is country music. Artists like Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn from Country’s golden age, George Jones and Waylon Jennings from the outlaw movement, and contemporary greats like Brooks & Dunn and Alabama float around in my mind like hungry ghosts. To the outsider, it might seem that the South’s literature and it’s music are nothing alike. After all, literature and music have completely different territories. However, there is one distinct characteristic that brings these two forms of art together, emotion. Emotion might not be a uniquely Southern idea, but it certainly runs rampant in both the South’s music and it’s literature. Both musicians and writers aim …show more content…
Earley presents Peggy as a complicated and unsatisfied cancer survivor who is entrenched in melancholy. A lot of Peggy’s unhappiness is focused on her husband, Vernon, but that does not mean her voice is hateful. Peggy does not hate her husband, but merely wants her audience to understand that she is “different than” he is (80). She has serious issues with her husband, notifying her audience that she doesn’t want her husband to be “just another good man” but to be something more than that (72). She asserts a desire for an invigorating passion that she has lacked for so long. Moreover, based on all of her problems in life, her voice is one of discontent and one that is looking for sympathy and understanding from her audience. She succeeds in her attempt to gather sympathy largely due to the emotional radiance she emanates throughout the story. She shows this emotion gradually, starting from the story’s inception where she explains how she wanted to “build a house in Rutherfordton” with “noise and traffic”, but how instead she lives in a trailer in a less than ideal part of Appalachia. The story certainly helps her gather sympathy from her audience, but her real success lies in her inner commentary shortly after. She gives her audience a spectacular view of her inner feelings during her house problem with Vernon. She explains how she just “signed the papers” away without …show more content…
Rosa Coldfield from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Like the voice of Peggy, Rosa’s voice is looking for sympathy, although for her sympathy is not the main goal. Rosa’s intentions are more calculating than Peggy’s because for her sympathy is only a weapon in her arsenal. Her primary objective is revenge. This classic southern motif makes its way through the midst of the nearly incomprehensible Absalom, Absalom! through a variety of characters, but primarily through Rosa. The subject of Rosa’s revenge is Sutpen, a character she maliciously describes to Quentin as “not even a gentlemen” (9). Her hateful language for Sutpen is so strong that it even “invokes a ghost[like]” ogrish character “enclosed by its effluvium of hell” in Quentin (8). Clearly Ms. Rosa Coldfield’s desire for revenge is fiery. The method by which Rosa’s voice conveys her anger towards Sutpen is mainly through powerful description and also through a snowball effect similar to Peggy’s. Like in the example above, Ms. Rosa Coldfield consistently uses language to picture Sutpen negatively. Another example is when she describes Sutpen as a man who seemed like a “demon… who came out of nowhere…with a strange bunch of niggers” that violently tore up the land (5). Rosa’s vivid comparison of Sutpen to a demon who seemed to appear out of nowhere with strange slaves to ruin the land effectively depicts Sutpen derogatorily. She