I’m coming to the end of the novel Herland and I don’t love it as much as The Bluest Eye. I came across a discussion website discussing what it would be like in a society where women held the reigns of power and found the topic quite interesting. One person expressed that they felt that society would be a little better run, more democratically, less violently, and that decision would take a little longer to be made but they would be the right ones. Reading Herland helped sway this particular person’s conclusion about what the society would be like. One person disagreed completely and stated that if you were to replace all men with women in positions of power that there would be no difference in the way women would lead or govern. The author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a social critic and feminist writer in the United States. One would assume she was a feminist based off of her creation of a utopian society made up of entirely women. Gilman aims for familiar targets like the role of women, violence, and the institution of marriage. Because of Gilman’s ideas, she is considered radical and dangerous. I liked that Herland was a short read and had many roots to the key themes and genre. I came across a book review. on Herland that discusses the significance of the short novel. It is a feminist classic and this book review provided a new perspective to the book.

I just started reading the book called Herland. I found an online textbook of the novel, which has been a help to me so far. It’s an electronic textbook. The plot of the novel involves three male explorers Terry Nicholson, Jeff Margrace, and the sociologist Vandyck Jennings and their discovery of a female utopia. This novel was written to express the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, feminist views and beliefs. Two thousand years ago, a foreign army exterminated the men of Herland. The women rebelled and found a way to asexually reproduce. I have researched that Gilman is an accomplished writer and a sharp social analyst and theorist. In this book, Gilman tells of a group of three adventurers who set out to find this county of women after hearing rumors about it. So far, I’m enjoying this novel. It is very different from the usual types of books I read.

The Bluest Eye incorporated so many themes. The story is about so many things one being race relations in the 1940s. Others include child abuse, bullying, and one that really struck me was the piece on beauty; why and how her entire community can consider a young and innocent girl ugly. Reading the last paragraph of the novel really haunted me. I came to the realization that so many innocent characters must face discrimination, but they had to stay strong and endure the pain. Those characters that couldn’t bear the agony would be destroyed. I came across another insightful blog that focuses on The Bluest Eye. These blogs help me formulate my own blogs and are really helpful to me. book discussion guide
This blog contains important quotes from the book along with brief summaries before the quote is said. I think "The Bluest Eye" is a very good book for teenagers to read. It allows us to understand how cruel humans can be towards each other. The world we live in today is full of discrimination and racism still exists everywhere. To create a better living place, we have to be generous and kind to everyone and treat people with the same respect we would want in return. “We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. and she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength."

I just decided to do another project using the Bluest Eye. After a lot of research I found a reenactment of one of the scenes from the novel and found it very interesting so I want to reenact a scene from the book myself. Pecola is such an interesting character and acting out one of her dramatic dialogues would be something fun for me. Pecola displays such self-hatred as the novel progresses. I think reenacting a scene in which her self-hatred is so apparent would be a strong visual. Pecola is just as upset by her parents’ fighting as is her brother, Sammy’s behavior. He runs away sometimes, and Pecola often wonders why he never takes her with him. She secretly thinks that maybe if she were prettier, then things would be different, especially if she had blue eyes. People would see her differently, including her classmates and teachers, and she would even see herself differently. She would see herself as beautiful, instead of the ugly little girl she is disgusted with when she looks into the mirror. Pecola’s mother treats her coldly and is ashamed of her. Maybe this is why Pecola can’t even find her own beauty that lies within herself.
After some research, I came across a website that provides key questions that allow the reader to dig a littler deeper into the novel. This website is a book discussion guide for the book. There are a lot of reflection and discussion questions to think about.