Compare And Contrast A Certain Lady And We Wear The Mask
Anna Campbell
Professor Himmel
ENC 1102
19 March 2018
Keeping Up Appearances
Popular culture is fascinated with the unreliability of appearances, yet many individuals feel the need to hide reality behind a false appearance. A beast may truly be a handsome prince, but regular people must conceal their flaws. This conflict is described in the poems “We Wear the Mask,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and “A Certain Lady,” by Dorothy Parker, with varied emotions; Dunbar addresses the subject with sorrow, whereas the tone of Parker’s poem is bitter and mocking.
In “We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar uses the image of a mask to describe the way outward appearances can give false impressions of a person. In the first line, he describes the titular
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The narrator “can smile for you” and “can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed” but describes her heart as having died a “thousand little deaths” (Parker 1, 6, 8). The repetition of “can” causes the actions to seem emotionless and forced, while the list of actions seems like a recital of meaningless statements and not from genuine feeling. As a result, the pain of the narrator is not a surprise; rather, her diction implies it before she describes it directly. When she does explain her feeling of anguish and heartache, her usage of hyperbole and metaphor lends force to her description. Her emotionless, rehearsed list of ways she falsifies her feelings and reactions contrasts to the grieved description of her sorrow at his …show more content…
This is most evident in the final lines: “Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go..../And what goes on, my love, while you 're away/You 'll never know” (Parker 22-24). Parker’s use of the ellipsis lends a pause for dramatic effect, almost as if the narrator is closing the door behind the one she loves before expressing truer sentiment; once he can no longer see her, her lighthearted smile turns into a bitter or mocking smirk as she muses upon “what goes on” while he is away. Whether the reader interprets “what goes on” as simply the narrator’s hurt or as her own romantic straying, the ending of the poem expresses her bitterness concerning her love’s ignorance of her pain at his
Why People Wear Mask Analysis
1000 Words | 4 PagesThe oldest found mask is from 7000 BC, and experts believe it was used for rituals and ceremonies. Masks have an important cultural context in history, and as the use of masks has progressed, humans have adopted masks into other forms of entertainment and festivities. In present times, with better understanding of human psychology, society has come to understand that people wear emotional “masks” as well. Masks have a somewhat important context in both Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”. Both works describe masks as a way to hide one’s true self from everyone; Dunbar, however, depicts masks as an emotional barrier to cover up one’s true emotions or feelings, while Golding uses masks as a physical object to hide behind.
African American Culture In Langston Hughes And We Wear The Mask
802 Words | 4 PagesSuch personification mirrors Dunbar’s use of figurative language, which relates the poems in more ways than one. Dunbar touches on human features such as cheeks and eyes in his poem but also uses a spiritual element to advance his point of view. Furthermore, “We Wear the Mask” was written in 1896; a period in American history that was post-slavery but still had widespread discrimination. The spiritual connotation within Dunbar’s poem can allude to African American churches and/or the hymns slaves sung on plantations. Nevertheless, the struggle of African Americans is a symbol of both presented
Summary Of In Defense Of Masks By Kenneth Gergen
267 Words | 2 PagesHe wants people to avoid thinking that developing only one true self identity is healthy. A mask allows an individual to see his or her full potential by not having a true identity. Masks have multiple identities based on the certain situations and environments (circumstances) the person is having(undergoing). I agree with Gergens interpretation (assertion) and his psychological
Deceptive Appearance In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird
1031 Words | 5 Pages“they put on a false front to appear to be what our society values as signs of success - such as making a lot of money, living in a big luxurious house, having a high status job, and the like” (Scott). In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the story of two young children becoming older and losing childlike innocence. Countless examples of deceptive appearances are shown through many characters. Many people tend to put forward an appearance that they want others to see, and hide all the sadness and anger.
Compare And Contrast Frederick Douglass And Paul Laurence Dunbar
360 Words | 2 PagesAfrican Americans were not treated fairly during slavery. African Americans are just like everyone else and deserve the same right as everyone else, no one should be treated differently by their skin color. Frederick Douglass and Paul Dunbar both talk about slaves and being treated unfair. They both use personal experience to support their ideas. Paul Laurence Dunbar uses conflict in “we wear the mask” to get his point across about African Americans being treated unfairly after slavery ended.
Masks in 'We Wear the Mask' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
1218 Words | 5 PagesIn Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears.
Use Of Masks In The Great Gatsby
696 Words | 3 PagesHe utilizes the mask when he says that “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford…” (Fitzgerald ##). He wants everyone including Nick Carraway, the narrator, to know that he is a valuable and worthy person. However, it backfires when Nick Carraway says “I knew why
Behind A Mask Or A Woman's Power Analysis
913 Words | 4 PagesThe mask Jean Muir hides behind is the part of herself that she doesn’t show others and is sometimes is the method through which she achieves her goals, also, the mask symbolizes the various rules that people had to follow in Victorian society. Jean Muir’s mask that she hides behind is
Paul Laurence Dunbar's They Wear The Mask
851 Words | 4 Pages“We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes-.” This quote is from the poem, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar which is a poem about the struggle that Paul Laurence Dunbar’s family went through during their lives being enslaved. This quote represents the role that a mask can play in covering up true self. By wearing a mask, a person is covering up their unique features. Also, they are not letting anyone get to know them as well as hiding their persona from the public.
Masking And Signification In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
914 Words | 4 PagesMasks 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.
Jane Martin's Play Beauty Analysis
1625 Words | 7 PagesImagine being told as a female in today’s world you must look or act a ¬¬certain way in order to be accepted. Being what you want to be is not allowed and changes have to be made in order to be included. They say “pain is beauty, and beauty is pain” as they way a woman looks today are completely different from ten or even fifty years ago. In this paper, the reader will understand the mind of a woman in today’s society and the difficulties to be not only accepted but being her own person as well. Not only has the appearance of a woman changed but also role titles and job descriptions as well.
Social Construction Of Gender In 'The Mask You Live In'
2083 Words | 9 PagesThe 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. The mask is incredibly relatable to the social construction of gender, because it was created through the social construction of gender. Young males would not need to create a mask and live behind it if society didn 't force them too.
Faces By Sara Teasdale
323 Words | 2 PagesThe 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
Paul Lawrence Dunbar We Wear The Mask Analysis
681 Words | 3 PagesIt is, obviously, a symbolic one, that is meant to hide the suffering of people. It hides everything, “our cheeks and […] our eyes”, and “the eyes [being] the mirror of the soul”, the mask hides the inner you. (Dunbar, l. 2) (Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra). But, in addition to the hiding, there’s also the lie about the emotion. Indeed, the mask isn’t only meant to hide the emotions, but also to create new ones on the surface, as we can see when the author said “We wear the mask that […] lies” (Dunbar, l. 1).
The Contrast Of Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour
520 Words | 3 PagesWhen Richard’s heard the news of her husband’s death, he assumed Mrs. Mallard would be devastated. While everyone knew Mrs. Mallard was “afflicted with heart trouble” (57), him and her sister, Josephine, wanted to give her the news with “great care” (57). Josephine broke the news to Mrs. Mallard in “broken sentences”
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