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The Day They Burned The Books Jean Rhys Summary: A Personal Response to the Short Story



Kibin. (2023). Feminism and critical race theory in the day they burned the books, a short story by jean rhys. -examples/feminism-and-critical-race-theory-in-the-day-they-burned-the-books-a-short-story-by-jean-rhys-olCEfnCR


"Feminism and Critical Race Theory in The Day They Burned the Books, a Short Story by Jean Rhys." Kibin, 2023, www.kibin.com/essay-examples/feminism-and-critical-race-theory-in-the-day-they-burned-the-books-a-short-story-by-jean-rhys-olCEfnCR




The Day They Burned The Books Jean Rhys Summary



1. "Feminism and Critical Race Theory in The Day They Burned the Books, a Short Story by Jean Rhys." Kibin, 2023. -examples/feminism-and-critical-race-theory-in-the-day-they-burned-the-books-a-short-story-by-jean-rhys-olCEfnCR.


"Feminism and Critical Race Theory in The Day They Burned the Books, a Short Story by Jean Rhys." Kibin, 2023. -examples/feminism-and-critical-race-theory-in-the-day-they-burned-the-books-a-short-story-by-jean-rhys-olCEfnCR.


As a child and adolescent, Rhys was, according to her own account, "alone except for books" and voices that "had nothing to do with me. I sometimes didn't even know the words. But they wanted to be written down, so I wrote them down." Finding little comfort at home, Rhys explored other worlds available to her. At a convent school that she attended, Rhys, an Anglican Protestant, was drawn to the ritual of Catholic worship. In addition to being fascinated by the sheer sensual component of the service, Rhys noted that "instead of the black people sitting in a different part of the church, they were all mixed up with the white and this pleased me very much." For Rhys, the black women who worked in her house as servants offered her access to asecret world and a secret language, both far different from the disinterestedness of her mother. In her writing, Rhys would explore the tension between the ordered world of colonial life and the seductive world of island sensuality. But in her life, her sense of abandonment remained acute. "Gradually," she wrote, "I came to wonder about my mother less and less until at last she was almost a stranger and I stopped imagining what she felt or what she thought."


Rhys would be linked to a succession of men all of her life. Her emotional and financial dependence on them was exacerbated by her life-long alcoholism. "When slightly tight," Rhys wrote later in her life, "I can relax-also there are red letter days when I feel that after all I'm as much fun as the next woman really. However this doesn't happen often." Rhys's first love affair, her most traumatic and defining, began in 1910 when she met a distinguished and respectable Englishman named Lancelot Hugh Smith. Smith's power and charm captivated Rhys, but she was devastated when he ended the affair and arranged to pay Rhys a monthly allowance. Alone with her despair, Rhys began to write diaries and notebooks recording her emotional states; it was her first attempt since she was a girl in Dominica to order her experience through writing. In the voice of Julia, the protagonist of her second novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Rhys wrote, "I knew that if I could get to the end of what I was feeling it would be the truth about myself and about the world and about everything that one puzzles and pains about all the time." Rhys packed these notebooks away in the bottom of an old suitcase and they remained hidden for years, but the idea of writing had taken hold.


Captain Beatty is Montag's supervisor. He is well-read and able to quote from memory but uses his knowledge to enforce the government line that books cause unhappiness because they contradict each other. As Montag begins to resist Beatty's influence, Beatty mocks Montag's attempts to learn. In Part Two, under the guise of describing a dream Beatty had about a debate between Montag and himself, Beatty rapid-fires segments of opposing ideas and laughs as Montag becomes visibly upset, saying, "[w]hat traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up and they turn on you. Others can use them, too."


Faber was a professor before books were banned. Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 when details of the Holocaust were still fresh, and the question of how something like that could happen still lingered. Most people would like to believe that they would be a Montag, heroically awakening from a brainwashed mind to help save the day. Faber, on the other hand, is representative of the people who stand idly by watching atrocity affect other people, keeping their heads down to avoid trouble. Faber feels ashamed that he is not doing more but doesn't snap out of his inaction until Montag begins ripping pages out of a Bible in front of him.


Fire operates as both a destructive and creative symbol in Fahrenheit 451. On the one hand, depth and knowledge are absent from Montag's world because the government sanctions the burning of all books. On the other hand, the dust jacket group gathers around a fire for comfort as they connect with Montag and discuss their beliefs. The fiery bombs destroy the city, but it opens a path for Montag and the dust jacket group to try to share their knowledge with the city. 2ff7e9595c


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