Paul L. Dunbar's They Wear The Mask

Masks hide the truth and obscure the facts. They form a barrier between what is real and what is an illusion. Yet, during from the moment blacks were brought to this continent in chains, to the moment they were granted civil rights in the 1960’s, masks were a method of survival. Another way of life for African Americans was the practice of signifying. Signifying is mostly seen in the black literary tradition as a means for African Americans to take back power from the white through misinformation and deception. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, masking, and signifying serve as methods of survival for the narrator, as well as ways for malicious outsiders to take advantage of the narrator.

In the popular Disney movie Frozen one if the Characters constantly repeated, “Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know” (Frozen), the character’s kingdom and even her sister never caught on that anything was wrong. In Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s somber poem “We Wear the Mask” utilizes repetition, strong diction, and stanza structure in order to convey that there is more to a person that is visible to others.

Have you ever had a day when you are too embarrassed of yourself that you wanted to hide by wearing a mask? Masks are used in various ways, they can be used for a Halloween costume or a stage play. The astonishing thing is that those masks are visible to others. In the Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the characters such as Myrtle Wilson, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy Buchanan use masks that cannot be seen with the naked eye, they used them as a way to hide their flaws to others.

David Cordingly's “Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates” is an extraordinary book, although sometimes confusing. Yet it is of no surprise that Cordingly writes his book with enthusiasm and great interest, Cordingly is clearly a sophisticated expert in pirate stories and legends. What makes Cordingly’s book so interesting and original is that he explores the facts and details about pirate history while at the same time exposing the myths and romanticized lies. The book itself investigates the reality of piracy versus the fictional images of pirates and their unimaginable portrayal in books and movies. Therefore the purpose of this assignment will be for me to give a detailed evaluation of David Cordingly's

The Mask You Live In begins with a George Orwell quote "He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it". The use of this quote in the documentary is to explain how men and young boys create a façade in which they live their lives behind. They put on a show for the world, while living behind this falsely created persona of happiness and security. The mask is the hard shell that young men are expected to face the world with. They are expected to show only their best selves and hide their insecurities and worries.

Faces by Sara Teasdale is a sorrowful poem. The speaker is talks about the masks people wear to hide their pain. The “disguise” hide a person shame and embarrassment that is underneath the “city’s broken roar.” When the speaker states, “the meeting of our eyes,” she is express that the stranger can see through her mask just as she can see through theirs. The main theme of the poem is centered on the masks that we wear in society, but the poem digs deeper than the simple statement, ‘we all wear masks’. Teasdale presents the insight that when we are walking on the sidewalk, surrounded by the chaos of the streets, we delve into our own thoughts and the mask lifts. Because we are among strangers rather than coworkers, family, or peers, we do

In “We Wear the Masks,” Dunbar displays the oppression and pressure that the black community faced in the late 19th century. With remaining unjust laws and unforgetting former slaves, Dunbar evaluates the saddened and fake expression that his community faced. His title indicates that the newly freed black population in America could not truly be themselves but had to wear a “mask” that made them acceptable to the white population. Dunbar unites his community by projecting them as a whole encountering a new form slavery together. The poem aims to express how the black population was forced to hide their continued suffering in order to not endanger their newly gained freedom. He writes, “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries / To thee from

“The Minister’s Black Veil,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a black veil to symbolize the sins that the human may carry throughout their entire life. “ At the end of the story, as he lies dying, the Reverend Mr. Hooper says that he sees a veil on all the faces of those who are attending his deathbed. In this way, the major theme of the story is developed; that is, it is suggested that everyone wears a black veil, that everyone has a secret sin or sorrow that is hidden from all others. Everyone could, like the Reverend Mr. Hooper, cover his face with a black veil.” ( Reed 3 ). In the story, the veil gets portrayed to an extent where everyone makes it seem as if the veil is not appealing. “She begs him to take off

He used this motif of wearing a mask a great deal in his novel, and it leads us to believe that, everyone wears a mask, even society. The idea shown in this poem is also shown through the narrator’s introduction into the novel. For example, in the prologue, Ellison wrote, “I am an invisible man…I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (3). This shows how the narrator represents the norms of society in that people are forced into wearing masks in order to even be seen in other people’s eyes. The narrator begins, in literal terms, as one of those people who haven’t realized that being themselves is just not enough. Throughout the novel, though, he begins to realize this and even though he does everything he can to try to rip himself away from this reality, he ends up with so many masks on that he cannot even remember who he

Masks are one of the most important things in Wonder because it shows that being yourself is the most important thing. Your looks don’t define you, your mind and heart is what is most important. One of the quotes that really inspired me was when Auggie was going to school in his bleeding scream costume and he overheard one of his dearest friends talking about him, “I would kill myself if I looked like Auggie (79).” This quote really spoke to me because

Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African-American poets to receive widespread recognition from both the Caucasian and African-American communities released many pieces of literature expressing his feelings throughout his life during the Reconstruction era. Two of these pieces, “We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy” were short poems that veered from his regular dialectic pieces, aimed at aiding in Reconstruction, and held hidden rebellions against the mistreatment of African-Americans at the time the passages were released. The African-American and Ethnic Literary Studies critical approach is a tool used while critiquing pieces of literature that hold common themes or elements tracing back to slavery and segregation in early America. This approach

The mask is thus a metaphor for social performance by African- American’s to avoid the consequences associated with telling the truth about their experiences with racial injustice and their feelings about it. The mask wearer is portrayed as having to pretend they are content when they had no reason to be so in the existing social context and this emphasizes the significance of the mask as a tool of survival Dunbar’s piece begins with: “We wear the mask that grins and lies / it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,”- this is quickly an indicator that this mask is a device used by its

The quotation “We all have a social mask…” by Phil McGraw suggests that everyone has a social mask that they put in front of others, whether it is good, evil, happy, or sad. Since people tend to hide their true selves in front of others. This quotation relates to the people in my personal life through two aspects.

In We Wear the Mask, the author’s rhetorical purpose is to teach the reader why people hide behind their emotions. Dunbar states in the poem that “We wear the mask”, but what mask? What are ‘we’ hiding from? Dunbar explains that we (everyone) are hiding our feelings about one another. He is trying to make the reader realize what people are hiding from everyone else. To show this, Dunbar uses many different rhetorical patterns throughout his poem.

In the two poems "I Shall Paint My Nails Red" by Carole Satyamurti and "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar the authors express their different ideas in similar ways, for instance, in sound and symbolism. The first poem is written in open form because it does not have any rhyme or meter and the second poem is written in closed form because it is written in rhyme and meter. All though they're written differently, they both have two things in common. Both authors use sound and symbolism in their poems.