Essay Questions

How does religion enable Isadora to cope with her childhood trauma?

Rutherford expounds, “She’d (Isadora) known her share of grief, had Isadora. Her mother Viola, she’d told me, died when she was three, which meant that she and her sisters had no one to teach them to think like independent, menless Modern Women…Certainly her father was no help. Isaiah Bailey was a wifebeater, that’s how Viola died, and once she was buried he started punching Isadora and her sisters around on Saturday nights after visiting his still. Yet, miraculously, Isadora had remained innocent. There was no hatred in her or Selfishness. No vanity or negativism. Some part of her perhaps the part she withdrew when Isaiah started whaling on her, remained untouched, a part she fed in the local African Methodist Episcopal Church, and shored up with scripture: a still, uncorrupted center like the Chinese lotus.” The church emboldens Isadora; consequently, she becomes stoic. Her father’s omnipresent maltreatments do not elicit resentment in her. Her unresponsiveness towards the abuse is attributed to the church’s teachings regarding forbearance. Moreover, construing the scriptures diverts her antagonism for they motivate her to endure the mistreatment. Psychoanalytically, Isadora employs Sublimation in countering her father’s deliberate cruelty.

Outline a psychoanalytic explanation on the link between Falcon’s dwarfism and his penchant for oppressing colored people.

Rutherford recalls, “ The master of the Republic, the man known for his daring exploits and subjugation of the colored races from Africa to the West indies, was a dwarf. Well perhaps not a true dwarf, but Ebenezer Falcon, I saw, was shorter even than the poor, buggered cabin boy Tom. Though his legs measured less than those of his chart table, Captain Falcon had a shoulder span like that of Santos, and between this knot of monstrously developed deltoids and latissimus dorsi a long head.” Psychoanalytically, Falcon Displaces his infuriation, which is ascribed to his dwarfism, to the vulnerable colored folks whom he trades as slaves. The dwarfism elicits his inferiority feelings; he mollifies his unconscious yearning for superiority by suppressing the slaves. Tyrannizing other individuals, who did not contribute to his dwarfism explicitly or furtively, gives him the opening to assert his supremacy. He thoughtlessly persecutes them so that they can endure the same discomfort he tolerates owing to his degrading shortness (Displacement).