Roselily

B Block Thursday, January 14th.

a) Answer the questions below. Take particular care with question 5. Please post your responses on your blog.
“Roselily” Alice Walker
1) Describe the story’s point of view. How does the point of view affect your understanding of Roselily’s character and her circumstances?
After every wedding related part of the story, the reader is then taken into all the dreams, thoughts, and emotions of how the black woman is feeling towards marrying her groom. The story conveys a mixed feeling of emotions of how the woman feels towards a man that she feels she hardly knows. Her view shows that she is in two minds about getting married to her husband because she doesn’t want her freedom of being married to someone to be taken away from her, but then on the other hand she feels that she will be looked upon differently by her husband and this is something that she wants and looks forward to. With Rosalily’s character you cannot quite grasp her thoughts because they are always so different from the opening of the priests word until his final words.

2) How does the first paragraph announce the nature of the story’s conflict?
The first paragraph announces the nature of the story’s conflict, as soon as Roselily compares herself to a child in her Mothers wedding dress sinking into quicksand, it is almost as though she wants to be grown up but she still feels like a little girl inside and that she cannot handle what is going on around her and she gets distracted very easily and feels and though she is sinking because there is nothing that can pull her back up into the real world.

3) What do you think Roselily’s reflections about her fourth child reveal about her character?
Roselily’s reflections about her fourth child reveal about her character is that she has obviously had three children before that, but she felt as though she had to give her son to his father because she couldn’t give her son what she thought he deserved. I think this is a very big and caring thing to do because no mother wants to give their son away, she could of kept him and gave him the bare minimum of what she has but she decided against this and wanted what was best for her son. I don’t think she wanted her son to grow up and feel the way that she did when she was growing up because if he moved to New England he would be given the respect and opportunity he ought to have. You can tell that she still thinks about her son a lot and wonders of what he will grow up to do and will he be more like his father, this shows that she didn’t just throw her son away, because she cares for what he will make of himself in the future.

4) Describe the groom. What kind of man is he? What sort of life is Roselily likely to have with him?
The grooms thought are only described from the woman’s thoughts, but he feels anger and contempt for the white people driving by in their cars-feels as though they are disrupting the wedding. The groom seems like a very strict and proper spoken person, and thinks that he would probably know better most of the time. He doesn’t show any real emotion towards his soon to be wife and she feels that she can change enough for him to look at her different, but shouldn’t they marry because they love each other and no because of how they feel they are able to change someone and how far they would go to be changed. At the end of the story everything is put into place and they both know where they stand with each other, he wanted to marry and so did she, but I think they married for the wrong reasons and neither of them will get what they thought they would get from the marriage.


5) Write a paragraph in Walker’s style written from the point of view of the groom. You may place it in the story wherever it best fits and serves to reveal something essential about his character. (Length = A polished 300 words)
Be creative and try your best to imitate Walker’s writing style.
(Placed after “his peace”)
He thinks of his wife to-be, who comes along with baggage. Baggage but still the wife he loves and the woman he wants to marry. Joined by marriage forever. He wants to be able to show how he lives his lifestyle. He is sure that this is what she also wants. Although he knows she is just looking for the respect she thinks she deserves, like when she gave her fourth child away, she thought that his father would be able to give him the life she thought that her son deserved. He is able to sense the awkwardness of the people at the wedding. But he know that he is marrying his wife not them. He is ready for someone new in his life that is easy enough to please and not too much work. People will look at her different now that she is with him and she will experience so much more in life by being with him. He wants his peace in life and I think that is what she is looking for as well. Freedom. Respect that she is deserving of. During the ceremony he is in another world, his eyes stare straight through her. He feels, hears nothing. He does not remember anything of the ceremony except for “his peace” and this is all he wanted, was peace in his life and he realizes that this is not what he will be having because of the life his wife had already been through. This hit him as he left the wedding with his wife. He was speechless, he was free from any kind of reaction. He wanted to be desperately there for his wife but something inside his head was telling him not to be. He could not figure out why. He was supposed to be feeling a feeling that he has never felt before and will never be given the chance to feel again.