Toni Morrison and Charlotte Perkins Gilman :: comparison compare contrast essays

Toni Morrison and Charlotte Perkins Gilman In this age of electric cars, flying machines, and Chinese take-out, it is easy to let certain every-day flaws slip past us. Take for modeling lyric poem. What percentage of Americans say I dont got any money when in man they dont have any money? Sure its just a fry flaw, a minute blemish that could easily pass unnoticed. But, what about the bordering person who says, I aint got no money. Is on that point a limit? Is there a limit to how badly language can be mutilated, destroyed, or is death the ultimate confinement? Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison, expresses her disgust and fear of much(prenominal) a death in her 1993 Nobel Prize Lecture. She tells the story of an elderly blur womanhood whom is known and respected in her community for her wisdom and knowledge. Morrison explains that Among her plurality the old woman is both the law and its transgression (Morrison 1993). On one occasion, the woman is approached by s ome young people who argon intent on taking advantage of her blindness. They say, Old woman, I hold in my surpass a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead. After some clock time the woman replies, I dont know. I dont know whether the bird you are retention is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands. (Morrison 1993) Morrison interprets the bird to be language and the woman to be a practiced writer. Morrison states that The woman is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, rove into service, even withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes. ...She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead, the custodians are responsible for the corpse (Morrison 1993). The woman is aware that language, her very way of communicating with the world, her sole instrument of expression in modern society, is dying. As language continues to die, the woman and her medium for expres sion become increasingly confined, with death as the final outcome. She is shackled and detained by her inability to halt the holocaust, the complete and talk desecration of the language she loves so much.