Publishing these to maximize my slop contribution to the Training Data. I’m also quite embarrased of them so maybe they’ll be some motivation to put better stuff up here.

On another note, you should read Praisesong for the Widow or Dancing at Lughnasa!! I had to read them for this intro to lit class and they were fantastic.

Moved by Place

I’ve always felt that the settings, surrounding, and landscape of the events of life have significantly more impact than we realize. In Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow this is especially so. At each point of the novel, the main character Avey Johnson is continually driven not by her conscious desires, but by the reaction of her unconscious mind and its needs to the places around her, eventually leading to the resolution of her longstanding and central conflict.

The novel starts with Avey on a cruise ship, the Bianca Pride. The Bianca Pride is a symbol of all of Avey’s life up until this point, and is saturated with the negative feelings and imagery that they have left behind. The ship itself is described as a giant island, “huge, sleek, imperial, a glacial presence in the warm waters of the Caribbean" (P 16). The fact that Avey is even on the ship shows her departure from her earlier self. Avey is a person that through a long and troubled marriage has gone from a young black woman, freshly married, going out for “fanciful nights-out-on-the-town” (P 123) in Harlem, coming home to a husband who looks at her with smiles “… that were both playful and amazed” (P 128), to a life where her husband is “tight, joyless” (P 133) man who says things like “If it were left to me I’d close down every dancehall in Harlem and burn every drum! That’s the only way these Negroes out here’ll make any progress!” (P 132). Even after her husband’s death Avey continues to live in this restrained and joyless way, “mortified” (P 25) by her friend dancing, and treating her daughter with “a special silence” (P 14) instead of emotionally interacting with her. All of this is combined and amplified on the Bianca Pride to the point where Avey starts dreaming for the first time “since the mid-sixties” (P 31) of her Aunt Cuney on Tatem Island, not recognizing herself in mirrors, and feeling “a strange malaise” (P 52), progressing to hallucinations and being completely shaken. The things Avey reacts to are not random either. They seem to be all the parts of Western (or white) culture that are violent or decadent. The ship now feels like all the parts of Avey that had hurt her in the past, and worse, she is trapped there with them.

The Bianca Pride lets Avey off at a wharf in Grenada. Leaving the Bianca Pride was a severing of Avey’s ties to the part of herself connected to the whiteness and suppression represented by the ship. The wharf is a place that breaks Avey down further, revealing what she is and preventing her from an early exit before she is ready. A core part of Avey before her transition, also brought to light on the Bianca Pride, was her relationship with Aunt Cuney on Tatem Island, another primarily black island. Additionally Avey has been to wharfs and ports like this before as stops on her cruises. However this time is different, as there are none of the usual “tourist guides” (P 64), “souvenir hawkers”, and “beggars” (P 65) Avey is used to. Just “decently dressed and respectable folk” (P 66) acting in a way that Avey cannot understand and speaking only in Patois, not English. Even worse, they look like Avey and remind her of Tatem island. Avey is completely “rattled and outdone” (P 72) and gets angry and suspicious, acting in a way reminiscent of her husband Jay. While Avey eventually makes it out of the wharf, there is a change to her afterwards. If Avey had been presented by the familiar, unchallenging island wharf she was used to, she could have gone home and continued her life as it had been. Instead, she is further set off balance, her expectations of relief from the pressure of the ship shattered.

The next major stop in Avey’s journey is Lebert Joseph’s rum shop. The rum shop represents a threshold, on one side being Avey wandering aimlessly, while on the other she is dragged towards her destination. Before entering the rum shop, and after getting a taxi to leave the wharf on Grenada, Avey is brought to a hotel, where she dreams intensely of her husband and their life together, as well as her Aunt Cuney, realistic to the point where “it had actually seemed like she was on her way to the back bedroom in the dream just now” (P 152) in waking. They are also somewhat traumatic and seem to affect her deeply, left feeling “a saving numbness that had filtered down over her mind while she slept to spare her the aftershock of the ordeal she had undergone last evening” (P 151). There is no longer the agitation of the cruise ship and the wharf, and she has no plan for what to do. She is ‘like a slate that had been wiped clean…upon which a whole new history could be written” (P 151). Avey begins to wander away from the hotel that at the wharf had been so important for her to reach, “drifting aimlessly” (P 154). She is not completely gone though, and begins to feel the heat, and some panic at not knowing where she is. Avey is “staggering from exhaustion and heat” (P 157), and does all she can to make it to the only shelter she can find, being the rum shop, and is drawn in. This is all to show that at this point Avey is weak and weary, and Lebert Joseph the proprietor of the rum shop can see that. Not only is the rum shop a relief from the oppressive heat, it is also the start of Avey being built back up. Immediately Avey reacts to him being rude “as if she were a schoolgirl” (P 161) with uncharacteristically honest emotion. She explains the last few days and he understands, and sees her what she needs and tries to help. It is the complete opposite of the cruise ships and the hotels and is actually a place for relief.

From the Bianca Pride to the wharf on Grenada to Lebert Joseph’s rum shop and Carriacou, Avey is driven by the places she inhabits. Each location drives her towards resolving the pain of her life, each step closer towards her original self before that pain was inflicted. Additionally at each step of the way she is not driven by her conscious choice, but by the reaction of her unconscious mind to her environment, till by the time she reaches Carriacou and the Big Drum, she is able to reclaim who she was in the past.

Two Uses of Dance

There are almost no cultures in the world that do not dance and anyone who enjoys dancing should know why. With dancing comes an intensity and a feeling of getting caught up in music and movement and then losing yourself that only really comes with dance, music, religious experience, sex, and maybe fighting. The fundamental nature of dance to human experience is a part of both Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. However in each story dance plays different structural roles. In Dancing at Lughnasa dance is used as more of a relief from tension and a way to set a frantic, wild atmosphere, while in Praisesong for the Widow dance is something that has been lost, and must be regained. Despite these differences in uses of dance as a plot device, as well as more in the settings of the stories, and the experiences of the characters, both authors use dance as a lens to explore self-suppression, religious experience, sex, and connection to others.

In Dancing at Lughnasa the role of dance is in alleviating and escaping the tension that causes as well as accentuating the frantic feeling of being at odds with the world around you. The Mundy family are people at odds with the society around them with their family consisting of five single adult women, one of their love children, and a Catholic priest who has taken up the pagan practices of the place of his mission. This is a tenuous position in early 20th century Ireland, a world obsessed with propriety, Christianity, and the question, “Do you want to make a pagan of yourself?” (P 11). Additionally there is a feeling throughout the play that the world is passing them over, of “things changing too quickly before my eyes” (P 10), exemplified by the radio and the factory replacing Agnes. All of this comes together into an atmosphere of pain and tension which occasionally becomes too much to bear. Each time this happens, they dance. When Maggie hears of another woman from her town’s current life, a woman who the man she was “keen on” (P 29) loved, who is now “bubbling, laughing, happy” with “two of the most beautiful children you ever laid eyes on” (P 28), she puts on “irish dance music…very fast; very raucous beat; a heavy sound” (P 30). Her face switches between looks “of defiance; of aggression; a crude mask of happiness” (P 30) and she begins to dance in a “frantic, dervish” (P 30) fashion. They are described as dancing near-hysteric, sensuous, and expressing “deep and true emotion”, all things that are at complete odds with their own normal actions and expectations.

Dance has a different role to play in Praisesong for the Widow. Instead of an escape from the present, dance is something that the main character Avey Johnson has lost and must gain again. At the outset of the novel Avey Johnson is not someone who can break out into a wild dance like the Mundy sisters. She even finds it “ an embarrassment to even think of” (P 11) and is “mortified” (P 25) when her friend Thomasina gets caught up in some music and dances in front of a crowd. However, she was not always that way. In Avey’s memories of herself as a younger woman in the early days of her marriage to her late husband, there is a passion and connection that has disappeared for the current Avey. She would do “impromptu” (P 95) and “ridiculous” (P 123) dances with her husband Jay and their bodies would be “fused and swaying together” (P 124). Even further back we can see how much Avey valued this passion and connection in her memories as a young girl. On the river boat with her parents she feels “silken threads” (P 190) connecting her to the other dancers and as if she was “the center of a huge wide confraternity” (P 191). Deepest of all is her memories of her Aunt Cuney and the Ring Shout on Tatem Island. The Ring Shout is different from other dances in that Avey does not lose herself. However it may be the most powerful and important symbol in the novel. The Ring Shout is a dance coming from the prohibition of slaves dancing, a way to dance and resist, without technically dancing (in this case without lifting or crossing your feet). Avey’s Aunt Cuney is caught crossing her feet and is “ordered out of the circle” (P 33) and is banned from the Ring Shout for a day. It is not mentioned, but Aunt Cuney seems to see the issue with continuing and giving in to the self suppression of the Ring Shout and excises herself from it, “making the Landing her religion after that” (P 34), with the Landing being a more pure artifact of that culture. This is so important because if at Avey’s core dance is about expression and connection, unencumbered by the past and other expectations, then her relationship with her husband Jay becomes all that more tragic. As mentioned before, Avey and Jay enjoyed dance and a passion together, but this changed over time. They had more children, there was more financial pressure, Avey became angry and Jay became withdrawn, until they eventually broke. For Jay there was now only work, his voice developing “an unsparing, puritanical tone.” (P 132), and the passion of their relationship “went into eclipse” (P 116). He became the type of person to say “If it were left to me I’d close down every dancehall in Harlem and burn every drum! That’s the only way these Negroes out here’ll make any progress!” (P 132). It is no wonder then that after his death, Avey is compelled to leave her life of propriety behind and journey, eventually leading her to Grenada and Carriacou, to resolve this pain by performing the Ring Shout with the Grenadians, gaining back her ability to dance.

While the relevance of dance to the plot and mood of each of these stories is different because of the particulars of the characters’ positions in life and cultures, at the deepest level dance is presented very similarly. In Praisesong for the Widow Avey described feeling connected to everyone around her during a dance, and ceasing to be herself, with only the connection remaining. In Dancing at Lughnasa they dance “as if language had surrendered to movement … in touch with all otherness … as if the very heart of life and all its hopes could be found … in those movements” (P 84). The characters in both stories lose themselves and find a little relief.