Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell
Originally uploaded by elizabethanne628.

Amy Lowell, from whom the term “Amyigism” came as a quip by Ezra Pound, had quite an interesting life. She was one of the Lowell Mills heiresses. (The Lowell family owned a vast number of textile mills in Massachusetts which gained them extreme wealth and power---two cities were named for the family!) She called herself “a businesswomen who decided to become a poet”. Coincidentally, she was more remembered for her family’s legacy than her poetry until somewhat recently. Her works were rediscovered when literary scholars began to look back at older works and tried to find same sex relationships in literature. Amy Lowell was never openly a lesbian, but she never married and for a considerable part of her adult life traveled and lived with a female companion named Ada Dwyer Russell to whom Amy wrote poetry containing erotic images. Although Amy took her writing seriously, other imagist poets sometimes made jokes about her work and physical appearance (Ezra Pound called her a hippopoetess). She, however, took the imagist movement to heart and sometimes went so far as to finically support other writers in the movement who were unable to support themselves. Lowell died in 1925 and was remembered for her writing, her extreme eccentric nature and her family’s legacy. Her works contain erotic/ suggestive images set in free verse, and others set in what she called “polyphonic prose”.

hull house

hull house
Originally uploaded by elizabethanne628.

The idea of settlement houses seems sort of nice when you first think about it. They were a place where poor women could live somewhat comfortably. They were safe from people who could take advantage of them finically and otherwise. They were able to work and sometimes even attend college. But, settlement houses were really apart of the nativist attitude that some Americans had at the turn of the previous century. These places stressed American ideals and pushed them onto the borders. They were expected to learn English and follow American and probably Christian cultural norms, which may have vastly differed from their native traditions. These women benefited from the free housing and food from the Settlement house, but at the cost of their individuality.

Language Barrier

In "America and I" and a few of the other recent selections we've discussed the issue of the language barrier. In "America and I" we hear an American woman tell Yezierska that she must first learn English before she can be successful. Everyone was upset by this, and I was too. It didn't seem fair that Yezierska should have to learn English before she could find a job she loved instead of a job she needed for survival.
On the otherhand, I can appreciate what the woman who was "helping" Yezierska was trying to say. America is a collective mass of many cultures, but at some point those cultures have to reach a central point. There has to be something in common for all the different groups of people to identify with. This means that people coming from other places (which is all of us, or our ancestry) have to accept parts of a new culture in addition to their own.
The saying, "When in Rome..." comes to mind. When people come to any country, they are choosing to go there and to assume or violate the norms of the culture. It is naive to think that a whole country should modify itself for the newest members. Immigrants who choose to come to America can also choose to learn English or not, but the choice is theirs. If they choose not to learn English, they are rejecting their new culture. Their culture is not rejecting them.

Railroad Standard Time

I'm sure that most of you know that the title of this story refers to the 1883 adoption of a standardized national time that would enable railroad and telegraphs to be synchronized between different locations. Some argue that this adoption was a significant historical marker of modern progress within the U.S.

So...I'm wondering about the significance of the title of Frank Chin's story as well as the symbolic import of the watch given to him by his mother. Passed down from his grandfather, the protagonist weighs the meaning of this "inheritance." His fragmented thoughts lead us through his complicated sense of his history, largely shaped by his dual identity as both Chinese and American. Why is this "gift" so problematic for him?