Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall

The following notes are largely my observations from the book "Brown Girl, Brownstones" by Paule Marshall. I managed to skip lecture both days we discussed it in class!



Written in several books, and spanning several years, "Brown Girl, Brownstone" is a bildungsroman, a novel about the creation of a person's identity, in this case, young Selina Boyce is followed from the time she's about 10 until her early twenties. The novel is written in a third person omniscient style, that allows for glimpses inside the minds of all the various characters.



The Boyce family is originally from Barbados, headed by Selina's stern and unforgiving mother, Silla, while her frivolous father, Deighton, chases tail and dreams of making it big. Selina also has an older sister, Ina.



The story opens with the family leasing a brownstone that once contained a white family. Through the images of the furniture and Selina's imagination we quickly realize that Selina idealizes the family that lived in her house before her, this is perhaps a reflection of her desire to belong, rather than her feelings of disconnection to the country she's living in.



Also at the start of the novel, Silla is working as a housekeeper for a wealthy Jewish family. The theme of interracial relationships is major in the novel, as some Caribbean immigrants believe that they are oppressed by their race, while Silla holds the view that any group of people in power will do everything they can to stay in power, and that the way to attain power is through diligence and hard work. Silla scraps, schemes and saves until she can own property of her own in New York, as she sees land ownership as the only way to get ahead.



In that sense, Silla seems to embody the American dream. She's calculating, ambitious, independent, strong and determined to provide a better future for her daughters. Her greatest dream for Selina is that she become a doctor, this sentiment of success through education and hard work is echoed in the predominant culture of the US as well as in other books dealing with Caribbean immigrants, like Danticat's "Breath, Eyes, Memory." Interestingly, Danticat writes a great forward for "Brown Girl, Brownstones."



Silla's strong presence scares Ina into a state of perpetual withdrawal. As the book progresses, Ina's character seems to shrink into the background. Because of her serious and stern nature, Selina looks to her father for love. Deighton loves his daughter perhaps because she does not question him, at least not at first. He wants to be a big man above all else, and routinely studies various correspondence courses in hopes of landing a job that pays big money. He seems oddly inclined to perpetuate his own injuries, though, as he repeatedly sets him self up to be the victim of racism. For example, Deighton spends months studying accounting, and is warned by his wife, his friends and neighbors that the big accounting firms downtown (which are run by racist, narrow-minded white people) won't hire him because he's not white. When he goes down to apply for work and is rudely turned away, he immediately recalls looking for work back in Barbados as a store clerk, where the snobby white people working in the store turned him away rudely.



Deighton's plans are all essentially get-rich-quick schemes, and he is more interested in dreaming about their outcomes than actually working towards making his dreams come true. This infuriates practical, single-minded Silla, who has to do nothing but work to make up for the fact that her husband is little more than a good time boy. The incident with the trumpet details precisely how useless Deighton is as a provider; Selina though does not see this until way later.



There are a large number of minor characters in the novel which would make anyone attempting to adapt it into a screenplay absolutely nuts. What I mean by that is that most of them are non-essential to the plot but take up enough time and space to make you really question their importance or lack of importance to the overall storyline.



Some of them, like Seifert Yearwood, Miss Thompson and Beryl's family, seem to exist to show the reader what life is like for those who adhere to the standards of the hard-working, careful planning and properly assimilating Bajan-American. Others, like Suggie, are obvious misfits who show the dissenting side of all that; while the majority of the whites who exist seem to serve only to remind Selina that she's not like them. Even her school friend, Rachel, fetishizes Selina's differences to an extent. All in all, these characters feel superfluous to the plot, but they take up enough pages to easy coax an eight page paper out of, if a student were so inclined.

As she grows older, Selina becomes more and more like Silla, she's as smart as her mother and as driven to achieve her goals. In an act of developed rebellion, Selina at first refuses to join the Association that her mother and so many of her friends have become a part of. When she does decide to join, it's purely to win some prize money intended as a scholarship. Rather than attend school with the money, Selina wants to run off with Clive; this act of defiance is intended as Selina's big F you to the community but in the end she allows it to fall apart.

Though she doesn't end up taking the money, she does effectively destroy her relationship with her mother by admitting she intended to do it.

The Middleman and Other Stories by Baharati Mukherjee

The Middleman, Bharati Mukherjee: the title of the collection refers back to the in between state that immigrants live in. From the first story, “The Middleman,” we deal with people in transition. “The Middleman” is written in a first person narrative, the protagonist character, Alfie is from both Baghdad and Queens and finds himself in a country straddling the North and south hemispheres.

This sets up a theme that follows in several of the other stories.

The objectification of women is rampant in “The Middleman,” as Alfie lusts after the beautiful Maria. She is used as a commodity by the men in the story. Women are used as keepers of cultures, the exchange of Maria is an exchange of cultural commodities. In describing conquest, the phrase “raping and pillaging of lands” is used to set women up as the symbol for the oppressed or conquered people. The exchange of Maria is a reflection of the exchange of power.

On almost every page she’s juxtaposed with land. Similarly, the dark girls that Alfie and his friends hire as prostitutes are described as broken toys or a video arcade.

Unfortunately for Ransome, these “conquered” lands as represented by Maria do have a power. It seems in her portrayal of Maria Mukherjee is familiar with the Native American idea that in a sexual exchange the woman takes life energy or power from a man. Maria resents being loaned out, but seems to enjoy her own kind of sexual conquest. As a symbol of native land, Maria behaves as a powerful force of nature, defeating the Gringo invasion as a jungle can cover and destroy a house.

Ted Turner is mentioned in the story as the man that Clovis T. Ransome would love to model himself after. As a hugely successful businessman, Turner stands in for a model of 1980’s self-serving, me me me capitalism that the natives of Mexico seem to resent; Mukherjee writes of them throwing out a “litany of president’s names, Hollywood names, Detroit names” as they clear cut the jungle around Ransome’s property.

There is a self-reflexivity in the stories, they continually draw back into themselves, the texts tell people about themselves, this explicitly concerns itself with the reading and narrative process, allowing a reader to see the connection between the author and the work.

We are creating a rupture in the exhausted genre of novels/ short stories. It’s a rejection of the modernist tradition. the novel offered itself as a puzzling catalogue of lists, a montage of disparate elements. Surrealist fiction is a hesitation between disjunction and conjunction.

In “A Wife’s Story” we see the use of myth and the distain for the ideas of myth. Second generation Americans look at the process as who were my people, wondering what their origins were as they’ve become too Americanized to fathom what life in their home countries was like.

Sita, the perfect wife, is the type of person that this author would like to critique and attack. She wants to rid herself of Indian myths but she can’t align herself with specifically American myths.
Mukherjee talks about the difference between being an immigrant and being an exile. Both her and her sister have different ways in which they’ve gone about transforming themselves within the new culture. Her sister has retained more of her Indian-ness, like the retention of the accent, continually wearing saris and keeping other traditions alive. The author sees this as a way of remaining static.

The story collection borders on the absurd, which my professor describes as referring to the syntax remaining normative, but they have bold subject matter and their unrealism. Things are unreal and unnatural. The principal of storytelling becomes fragmented and ironic, it looses touch with reality.

A Wife’s Story, she’s offended at the performance of “Glen Gary, Glen Ross” that she sees. From the angle at which she sits, both literally and figuratively, she can see the ugly part of the show. At this point, she doesn’t realize how she’s changed, the dream becomes tyrannical and changes you regardless of whither or not you wanted to change.

There is a discussion of the hazing process for new immigrants, which is somewhat like the stages of grief. You arrive, no one notices, then no one sees you, then they make fun of you and then they think you’re gross which is a type of acceptance. In order to find dignity within the borders a person must assimilate to the culture of the US and in order to do that the immigrant must first realize their differences through the scorn of the general population.

The closing lines of the story indicate that she has assimilated to the culture and she has effectively left her old life behind.

On the tour, she feels somewhat embarrassed to be sightseeing like a tourist, while her husband doesn’t think he’s seeing enough sites. An old English man takes a picture of her, as she is part of the landscape. She’s constantly asked to reflect back on herself in the ways that people are gazing upon her; she is part of the cross-cultural exchange that tourists find so fascinating about New York.

She meets her husband in a sari because she knows he expects it; but she is forced to take on certain duties over the course of his trip that are traditionally male, like handling the money and purchasing things for his trip. When she doesn't wear her sari, the man selling tickets to the
tour makes a lewd comment, her husband decides that this because she looks Puerto Rican. If she were in traditional garb he would not have treated her that way (!!!). Certain types of identity are expected because of race and ethnicity. To that end, she doesn’t wear all her jewelry because the rough elements of the city would expect a woman in traditional Indian garb to be loaded with fancy, expensive stuff.

When her husband tells her that he wants her to return to India, her reaction is in the reflection of the little girl kicking a bottle cap at her husband. The little girl represents the desires of the wife, who holds onto the protocol of a good wife by not flat out refusing to return.
Her husband is intrigued by the wide variety of things to be purchased dirt cheap on the streets of New York, while she is used to the splendor of American capitalism.

In “Loose Ends,” the protagonist is a white American dude named Jeb Marshall who is a Vietnam vet. He things his situation with his girlfriend, Jonda, is pretty great, comparing it to the US constitution. She wants more, is materialistic and demanding, a one-note American woman.
Jeb learned in Vietnam to kill everything he comes across, now, post-war, he works as a hit man. He describes the habit of killing as being akin to the way locusts swarm and consume the things they come across, he learned to kill in the war but he’s brought the habit home.

Alice, the blonde symbolizing America, who changes to an Asian chick he has to kill at the end. This student is not sure Alice was killed.

The story is critical of the American dream, saying that Alice will leave behind the idyllic pastel houses for the “greasers” to take over.

Jeb reflects on the reticulated python he sees at the London Zoo, the animal has killed piles of bunnies and left a ton of shit behind. Jeb fears he’s become like the snake, and in a sense he has, as he too slaughters innocents.

From the outside, FL looks normal, but he understands that middlemen are the ones who bring the things in to keep people in the comfortable situations they desire.

At lot of these metaphors slip, the idea of snakes coming in with the garden imagery that someone has infiltrated. Goldie Locks is an intruder, through the back door. On the flip side, he also sees himself as a snake. The metaphor slips and doesn’t contain who is who in America.

Who is the intruder? Who is the snake in the garden of Eden now?

The fighting among various ethnic factions can be seen here and in other stories in the collection, for example in Jeb’s run in with the law over the stolen car, and obviously in the closing scene with the Patels. There is an idea that something is changing in Loose Ends, he’s in his own personal jungle, he came back from Vietnam as the python, the locust.

His murder of the girl with the “snaking braid” is an assault on the American dream. She’s part of a rising demographic in the US, who owns property, something Jeb does not have. This inversion of the dream is likely what makes him assess that he’s become the “coolie labor” in his “own country.” Funny how he fails to realize it’s not his country and that his ancestors came here from Europe at some point and stole it.

“The Tenant” is third-person narrated by an unknown person, and centers around Maya, a naturalized American originally from Calcutta. She is aware of the differences between the feminine culture in the US and the one she was raised with in India, seeing the ways she was raised with as far more refined. She adopts a different set of behavioral practices with the different people she encounters in the story, proof that she lives on the border, so to speak.

A character being a Brahman is mentioned, and then seen as a metaphor rather than being a caste. The title doesn’t mean anything literally, there is a way that you practice being a Brahman, which is a class position, Indian is a cultural position, both are empty signifiers we infuse meaning into.

The ghost upstairs during her visit with the Chatterjis seems to be the past of their people, their cultural tradition. In some ways the couple are very traditional, they obviously keep up the traditional ways of cooking and gossip, yet they do not have children. This topic is too sensitive for Maya to bring up, so she doesn’t. In a literal sense, the ghost thumping upstairs is Mrs. Chatterjis’ nephew, a grad student bent on marrying a young woman from Ghana. Mr. Chatterji coming on to her in the car on the way home helps her see that all Indians want other Indians for wives, mistresses etc. Maya wants a shared experience that she cannot seem to find with her American friends.

She pursues relationships with inappropriate American men at times, and comes to realize that they see her as a sort of freak. She’s shocked at that realization, and instead turns to an Indian man, seeking out the familiarity of shared culture and understanding.
Mukherjee talks a lot about graduate students, people with Ph.D’s as well as adultery. There are elements of autobiography here. She married her husband after knowing him for two weeks, she thinks that she was rebelling against something. She talks about her marriage in terms of hormones and rebellion.

In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez

The following notes are taken from both lectures at UCLA and my own personal observations from reading In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez. I hope they help!

Told in three parts, the first two in which the Mirabels are characterized and the last in which they meet their demise.

The Mirabels are upper-middle class/ successful. Dad is a rancher, they own a store and pops is an assistant to a governor. They’ve got enough money and swing for the girls to be educated at seminary schools.

The class is supposed to be supporting the regime, and out of that class comes the most powerful opposition.

The girls are humble, hardworking. The huge plantations like the ones that the Mirabels have are the homes of the wealthy, and these people do not generally live in an urban setting. They are privileged people but they are not snobby.

Fela, their servant, is of African descent. She is also a valued member of their family unit, beloved by Mate who frequently looks to her for help, guidance and advice

There is going to be a real element of guilt here, that Dede survived while all the other died. Survivors generally do not want to talk about their experiences, and they often go through post-traumatic stress.
Minerva is a goddess of war or wisdom. That’s lucky for Alvarez. She has an indomitable spirit, she seeks freedom, both from the culture and from the regime. She slaps Trujillo in the face. She’s compassionate.

Mate is sensitive and scary. What are her motivations? Minerva is an intellectual, Patra does it to help the people, Mate does it for love.

The character is minutely crafted, she does an expert job of creating both interior and exterior portraits of these women.

The eventual martyrdom by survival for Dede is fascinating. All the important structural sections of the novel are introduced by Dede; while she doesn’t have the heroic stature of her sisters, she confesses that she’s scared to do the things her sisters do. It’s not about her husband, as she says at some times.

She’s not cowardly, she’s just a human being who recognizes a serious danger in her midst. She realizes when her sisters are taken away that she is a part of the revolution whither or not she wants to be. The careful reader would be more likely to identify with Dede, Alvarez had to retrieve the other characters from heroic and mythical proportions, which Dede was exempt from in a sense.

This humanization is evident in Minerva’s need to keep the appearance of strength up after she’s released from jail. She’s afraid, but she doesn’t want to let people down, and she knows that she’s become the icon of the revolution, so she smiles instead of weeping.

Women in Latin America do not often forage ahead in the world of men the way that the
Mirabels did. Feminists challenge the norms or the traditions that define the roles of women. Alvarez appropriates the language of religion to subtly subvert the roles of the genders within the story, with Patria taking on the role of a Jesus figure, and Trujillo’s self-deification.

When the women are jailed, they realize that they are sisters with the women who share their cell- the murderers and prostitutes are scary to them at first, but it doesn’t take much time for them to become a group.

The testimony approach to telling the story of the murders was the most realistic narrative trick she could have used. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable, but these people bring back what they remember and what they know about the facts of the situation. Here, the various voices bring back the perspective of the situation, but as the women are dead, they can’t tell the story themselves.

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia

Influenced by magical realism, the story follows four women over three generations of a family, some in Cuba and some away from it, but all effected by it. (Celia, Lourdes, Felicia & Pilar). Narrative shifts every chapter or so to allow a look into the minds and lives of each character, including some of the male ones.

Felicia’s madness is likely the result of syphilis traveling into her brain. She leaves a trail of maimed/dead husbands in her wake.

The women are divided over the revolution; Lourdes leaves Cuba after the rise of Castro, rejecting communism in favor of stanch capitalism (opening the Yankee Doodle Bakery in NY) while Celia becomes a sort of district arbitrator, earning power under Castro’s government.

Celia’s letters to her lost love, Gustavo, advance the plot, add dates to the action and allow access to her inner thoughts, becoming a journal. It seems the letters are never sent or replied to, lending credence to the journal concept.

Pilar, as an immigrant to the US, belongs to neither culture. She feels drawn to Cuba but once she goes there she understands she doesn’t belong. She joins the punk rock movement and strives to become an artist, perhaps hoping to paint a corner of the world for herself to reside in.

An undercurrent of racial issues reside here, as the darkness of a person’s skin directly equates to their status within the Cuban society.

Garcia is NOT a CHICANA, I repeat, NOT A CHICANA. She’s Cuban.

She uses the magic of Santeria to move the plot along, it brings to mind the interesting nature of the mestiza culture creating by the merging of Anglo religion with indigenous religion.

Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana by Demetria Martinez

The following is ripped straight from my notes from lectures at UCLA from Prof. Limon, as well as some of my own observations about Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana by Demetria Martinez. I hope these notes are helpful in suggesting things to look for as you read the text.

Martinez’ essay collection is a great example of what it means to live in a rapidly shifting society; in the new millennium, ideas of health, wealth, science and religion change as quickly as the skies over New England. Further, Martinez layers the issues of being female over these other complex topics, as well as the questions of living on the Frontera

It’s a series of funny personal essays. Well, not all of them are funny but the memorable ones are. She talks about human rights issues in the US: meal vouchers to give the homeless in lieu of spare change, universal health care, the debate over the use of the Spanish language in schools, the divide between those who are “more Mexican than you” and the standard issue Chicana.

She debates the choice of title in an essay called “By Any Other Name,” deciding in turn to be Latina “to promote pan-American unity”, Mexican because she likes that it “makes people flinch” also Mexican American caz everybody else is one, and Hispanic is fine in general for those who “couldn't’t care less about the debate over naming but who know they’d better get out and vote because right now they are screwed: low wages, substandard education, no health insurance, over-represented in prisons and military uniforms.”

La Frontera (the Borderlands) By Gloria Anzaldua

The follow text is ripped straight from my notes from lecture at UCLA, under Professor Limon, as well as some of my own observations from the text. I hope you can use these notes in your studies, and as suggestions of what to look for as you read La Frontera By Gloria Anzaldua.

The text is a manifesto of feminism, chicana-ry, written as poetry, reworked history and personal essay. Anzaldua asserts that the border is the place where the “third world grates against the first and bleeds.”

The border is an arbitrary line, it “crossed her” meaning that she never came here, her people were here already. She traces the lineage of the indigenous people of North and South America to Aztlan, a place historians think may have existed somewhere near Mexico city.

She often writes in Spanish, sometimes offering a side-by-side translation or lines that follow and explain what she’s written in English, but she writes in Spanish because she is refusing to subjugate her own language. Essentially she’s arguing that Spanish is not a “deficient language.”

She talks about the various forms of language that spring up on the borders, being a pocho, she speaks a sort of polluted Spanish unique to Chicanos. She further assesses that Chicanos speak no fewer than eight versions total of English and Spanish in their daily lives, however she refuses to believe that she speaks Spanish poorly. This type of idea is a distinction often made along class lines, coming from the more landed or wealthy folks in Mexico, down to the working poor there allowing them to feel better than the Chicanos across the border. There is a solid ideological link between Ethnic identity and language for Anzaldua.

Anzaldua was audacious in her time, blasting the patriarchy and writing openly about the acquisition of Mexican gods, like Coatlicue, and their transformation into the Virgin de Guadeloupe, La Lorena and Malinche (the raped mother). Before the Spanish, the people of South America passed property through maternal lines, this included royal power.

She exposes the underbelly of the culture, the tendency to treat women as disposable articles. Beating a woman is a behavior in line with tradition; it is the responsibility of the man of the house to punish a wayward female.

She asserts that women have three places in her culture, nun, prostitute or mother. The ability to serve a man is a woman’s highest virtue; however the Anglo culture prizes ambition in both men and women.

The imagery of snakes: used as phallic symbols by Anzaldua, but also utilized to highlight the difference between an Anglo interpretation of the symbol and an Aztec one. Snakes in the OG tradition of South America were animals of the earth and the underworld, symbols of infinity and linked with Shamanism and magic. Anzaldua links the magic of the snake to the magical creation process of writing.

Making Literature Notes Public Domain

For the past two years, I've been an undergrad in UCLA's English Department. Depending on the class, I often run into problems finding notes on the books I'm asked to read. This is generally true when I'm studying modern literature, which is the case for many of my classes. I find that the notes that are available to me online are often geared towards helping students cheat (by offering papers for pay, or synopsis for those who don't read the books) rather than helpful notes to enable better and more complete readings.

What I've wanted to find are notes on themes, characterizations, commonalities to other texts, and unique perspectives from thoughtful readers. I am not interested in cutting and pasting text from Wikipedia into my papers, and I hope you aren't either! For that reason, I'm not going to include page numbers or any specifics that you can use in your essays, I'll let you find your own support, but I'll help you find some interesting things to look for.

I'm in finals week right now of my second to last quarter at UCLA, so I don't think I'll be posting here forever, but hopefully my observations will be useful to future students. If there are other thoughtful students out there who would like to contribute, please feel free to email me at rachel.beezy88@gmail.com as I'd love to get a lot of information out there to students.