Coming of Age Essay - Grade: A+ PDF

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Coming of Age: Analyzing the Transition to Adulthood...

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Andrew Lisa Dr. Sanyal English 1202 27 January 2020 Coming of Age Essay Many eastern cultures have ritualistic and ceremonial ways to celebrate the coming of age of youth into adulthood. In western societies, the coming of age of youth is not ritualistically celebrated as it is in such eastern societies. The coming of age of youth in the east is a much more gradual process, sometimes marked by a slightly negative connotation from the perspective of the one who comes of age. This idea is depicted in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Lesson and Alice Munro’s Boys and Girls, where the realities of adulthood are realized and eventually accepted by a youth, initiating him or her into adulthood. In The Lesson, Toni Cade Bambara describes the coming of age of a young African American girl named Sylvia. The portrayal of the western version of coming of age which Bambara develops is accomplished through a stark difference in syntax and in Sylvia’s narration during the rising action of the short story compared to that during the falling action. During the rising action, Bambara uses a narration which resembles stream-of-consciousness where all of Sylvia’s thoughts are written down in a play-by-play manner precisely as she is thinking them. This characterizes her personality as happy-go-lucky where she does not focus greatly on one thought compared to another since nothing significant is on her mind. The climax which causes this change is established when Sylvia and her fellow classmates realize the economic gap between African Americans and white people living in the same area. Miss Moore further

accentuates this dichotomy when she states, “Imagine for a minute what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven” (Bambara 5). This significant realization takes over Sylvia’s thoughts and significantly alters her stream-of-consciousness and Bambara’s syntax regarding her thoughts. Instead of long run on sentences of narration, Sylvia’s thoughts are short, to the point, and almost all regarding this newly discovered economic gap. Bambara effectively uses syntax and narrative deviances to display Sylvia’s coming of age, where she is forced into the reality of her community’s economic situation. In Boys and Girls, Alice Munro portrays the coming of age of a young girl living on a fox-pelt farm. This example of the western version of initiation highlights differences between the expected roles of men and women in mid-twentieth century. Alice Munro displays the narrators coming of age through contrasting her feelings for the idea of being a girl at the beginning and end of the piece. The narrator, being the older sibling in the family, had always helped her father with jobs on the farm since her younger brother Laird was not quite old enough to take on the roles which she filled. She was told by her mother and grandmother that her chores were not “ladylike”, causing her to dislike the idea of being a “lady”. As she ages however, she realizes she must try continually harder to be able to stomach the chores which are carried out on the farm. To prove to herself that she can stomach the tasks, she brings Laird with her to watch her father kill one of their horses. In the aftermath, she narrates that her “legs were a little shaky” to establish her gradual change of perspective on the farm. This feeling eventually leads her to fail to fulfill her duties for her father, and he dismisses this fact by saying “she’s only a girl” to which she responds in thought, “I didn’t protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true” (Munro 149). Munro displays this contrast in the narrators thoughts towards the idea of being a

girl in order to show her coming of age as a more gradual process with a slightly disappointing connotation. Both Toni Cade Bambara’s The Lesson and Alice Munro’s Boys and Girls display a perspective on the western coming of age. Both Sylvia and the narrator of Boys and Girls are initiated into adulthood gradually by being exposed to ideas which they were disappointed to learn about their surroundings and themselves. Being much less ritualistic than eastern traditions, the western version of initiation into adulthood is displayed with disappointing, negative connotations which involve the recognizing the realities of what it means to be an adult....