Unit Three

        The three works I have selected to analyze within Unit Three continue the thread from the previous two units. Each story shares the common theme of the character's ability or failure to measure up to expectations. In "Nineteen Fifty-Five," Alice Walker writes about a young singer who gains every material possession he could wish for but cannot seem to grasp any sort of true meaning and fulfillment from life. In "The Lady of Little Fishing," Constance Fenimore Woolson tells the tale of a woman who found her way to a hunters' camp expecting to change their hearts, but failed miserably to accomplish her mission. In “Seventeen Syllables,” Hisaye Yamamoto recounts a story about a mother who uses haiku as an outlet to escape her unhappy marriage and life. In all three short stories, expectations are left unmet, and the consequences reach well beyond the character facing the failure alone.

“Nineteen Fifty-Five” by Alice Walker

In the short story “Nineteen Fifty-Five,” Alice Walker writes about a young white man who sings a song written by a black woman and struggles with the fame he receives from the success of the song. From the very beginning, the songwriter Gracie Mae describes the boy as seeming half asleep, even on stage (Walker 81). As time goes on, it becomes apparent just how popular the song has become. The young singer “Traynor is dressed like someone from a storybook” (Walker 83), overloaded with jewelry, surrounded by bodyguards, drooled over by fans, and has everything a person could ever dream of having.

Even so, he is completely empty on the inside. Traynor has no idea what the song is even about, much less what life is about. As he talks to Gracie Mae, she thinks to herself “It was like something was sitting there talking to me but not necessarily with a person behind it” (Walker 83). Beneath all of the worldly success and material possessions, Traynor is empty. He feels like a fraud, and acknowledges he truly is one when he tells Gracie Mae “They want what you got but they don’t want you. They want what I got only it ain’t mine” (Walker 84).

For the entire duration of the story, Traynor is trying to figure out what Gracie Mae’s song truly means. He begins to pick up on pieces here and there, but never fully grasps it as well as he hopes. The lyrics of the song are never written out, and a clear message is not presented to the readers. However, it is apparent that the song deals with some form of disappointment and emptiness. Traynor asks Gracie Mae if moving on instead of grieving (Walker 83), not wanting to wake up every day surrounded by strangers (Walker 84), and making the people you know happy (Walker 85) are part of the song’s meaning. He shares with Gracie Mae “I see twenty folks a day I don’t even know, including my wife” (Walker 84). In another conversation, he goes into further detail, explaining “I married but it never went like it was supposed to. I never could squeeze any of my own life either into it or out of it. It was like singing somebody else’s record. I copied the way it was sposed to be exactly but I never had a clue what marriage meant” (Walker 83).

Traynor tries to fill his life with some meaning just by keeping Gracie Mae in it. He invites her to dinner saying “I’m sick and tired of eating with them [men out there]. They don’t ever have nothing to talk about… But if you come we can talk about the old days” (Walker 83). Traynor also buys her a Cadillac, a five-hundred-acre farm, and a sizable house, among other things. However, these materialistic things just don’t mean anything to Gracie Mae. She enjoys some of his gifts but reaches a point where she is perfectly content with what she has and begins to sell or refuse Traynor’s gifts. Even though in the world’s eyes Gracie Mae has the harder life of the two, she thinks to herself “...seem like one way or another you talk to rich white folk and you end up reassuring them. But what the hell, by now I feel something for the boy… Couldn’t be nothing worse than being famous the world over for something you don’t even understand” (Walker 83). Traynor ultimately dies young, never having discovered any more purpose or meaning in life. Externally, he had met every expectation the world had told him was important to meet. Internally, however, he had completely failed himself.

“The Lady of Little Fishing” by Constance Fenimore Woolson

In “The Lady of Little Fishing,” Constance Fenimore Woolson tells the tale of an unnamed woman who finds her way to a camp for hunters, hoping to change their hearts but ultimately failing to do so. The camp held “only a reckless set of fellows who carried their lives in their hands, and tossed them up, if need be, without a second thought… There wasn’t any nonsense at Little Fishing,—until she came” (Woolson 88). When the woman, whom the hunters soon begin to call “our Lady,” arrives at the camp, she appears and acts as if she were a saint or an angel, sent straight from heaven. She immediately gives them a sermon the very night she arrives, “the like of which was never heard before; no argument, no doctrine, just simple, pure entreaty… ‘For the love of God, my brothers, try to do better’” (Woolson 89). The men are instantly entranced, and seek to do better, but not for the love of God so much as trying to please her and even win her over.

Eventually, it is revealed that the Lady has come from Scotland as a missionary and intends to keep moving through the camps and on towards the west. The hunters beg her to stay, and after asking the men “Do you really believe that it will be for the good of your souls?” (Woolson 91), she agrees. This was the beginning of her demise. During the course of that winter, both the men and their Lady changed. The men became cleaner, causing her to remark that the “new cleanliness of [their] inner man required a cleaner tabernacle for the outer” (Woolson 93), although in reality, the men weren’t changing on the inside.

The Lady was changing in both her appearance and her countenance. The men lose their reverence for her and explain that they once thought she was a saint, but now see her for the simple woman she is (Woolson 96). Finally, in the September of the year after her arrival, she is accused of loving one of the men in the camp, and she admits that she does in a tearful fit of emotion. When the man rejects her, she enters such a great depression that she dies a few weeks later. On her deathbed, she murmurs “Friends… I am well punished. I thought myself holy,—I held myself above my kind,—but God has shown me I am the weakest of them all” (Woolson 99). These are the last words she speaks, and then she is gone.

Both the Lady and the hunters had expectations that were not met in this story. The woman hoped the men would change, but perhaps even more fatally, thought she was capable enough to be the one to change them. The men had regarded their Lady as a saint but were sorely disappointed when it became apparent that she was an average woman with faults just like the rest of them.

“Seventeen Syllables” by Hisaye Yamamoto

In the short story “Seventeen Syllables,” Hisaye Yamamoto writes about a young teenage girl who discovers that her mother’s obsession with haiku is actually an outlet to keep her distracted from an unhappy marriage and life. The young girl named Rosie observes that her mother exists in two separate personalities—her mother, who did all of the housework and work in the tomato fields; and “Ume Hanazono,” her pseudonym, who lost herself in the writing of haiku. Rosie explains that when her mother transformed into Ume Hanazono after the dinner disher were done, she became an “earnest, muttering stranger who often neglected speaking when spoken to and stayed busy at the parlor table as late as midnight scribbling with pencil on scratch paper or carefully copying characters on good paper” (Yamamoto 100).

It quickly becomes apparent that Rosie’s mother’s obsession with haiku interferes heavily with her marriage. Rosie’s father often becomes impatient, frustrated, and aggressive when his wife spends too much time consumed with haiku discussion. After he abruptly leaves a gathering of friends in another family’s home, followed by his confused wife and daughter, Rosie’s mother apologizes by saying “You know how I get when it’s haiku… I forget what time it is” (Yamamoto 101). Rosie’s father remains unimpressed and even grunts at this.

One day, Ume Hanazono’s work is formally recognized. The editor of the Mainichi Shimbun, the paper to which she submits her haiku, comes to hand-deliver a Hiroshige as a prize for her gifted penmanship. She gets carried away in conversation once again, and this time her husband cannot contain his impatience. In a fit of rage, he demands the editor leave their property and demolishes the Hiroshige in the fire under the bathtub. Rosie finds her mother and attempts to console her, but instead soon finds out how truly bitter her mother is toward both her own marriage and marriage in general. She had been in love with another, “well-to-do” boy, and had given birth to his still-born son (Yamamoto 105). Having been cast from both her lover’s family and her own family, she was left with only a choice between suicide and arranged marriage to a man in America. The young man that was selected by her sister, known to Rosie as Aunt Taka, was “of simple mind, it was said, but of kindly heart” (Yamamoto 105).

        It is evident that Rosie’s mother neither loves nor enjoys intellectual conversation with her husband, and therefore must find such companionship elsewhere. She finds this memory to be so vile that she grasps Rosie’s wrists and forces her to promise she will never marry. Only, Rosie has just experienced thrilling romance the previous night, and her reaction is all too telling. Conflicted with a sudden whirlwind of emotions, “Rosie, covering her face, began at last to cry, and the embrace and consoling hand came much later than she expected” (Yamamoto 105). Her mother is so bitter about her own failed experiences that she can hardly bring herself to support her daughter’s future experiences.