Please let me know if the following intro paragraph reads well/ the thesis can be found obviously enough and is argumentative/clear enough. Thank you so much!!
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are a pair of narratives that bear a number of salient parallels: both are classic fixtures of the African American literary tradition, both concern the journey of a young, black, male protagonist, and both deal with the protagonist's racially charged quest for meaning and identity in early to mid-20th century America. But the parallels stop here when one considers the portrayal of women in each of these texts; such is the disparity, in fact, between the treatment of female characters in these two narratives that women actually occupy utterly divergent roles in each author's tale. The question of these novels' treatment of women is an important one to examine because any text that seeks, as these two novels do, to meaningfully explore the heritage, tradition, and journeys of a particular culture or people must obviously give, as a minimum, some degree of weight and meaning to the part played by women in those traditions and journeys. In Song of Solomon, women are not only significant to the plot but they are portrayed as essential to the protagonist's self-discovery and identity; in Invisible Man, conversely, the opposite portrayal is seen: female characters are represented as playing no meaningful part in the narrator's search for identity and are only important as figures in relation to the male characters. This paper will suggest that where Morrison's Song of Solomon uplifts, glorifies, and gives importance to women, Ellison's Invisible Man belittles, degrades, and marginalizes them; as strong as Morrison's positive portrayals of the importance of women in the protagonist's journey are, Ellison's negative portrayals of them are equally potent.
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man are a pair of narratives that bear a number of salient parallels: both are classic fixtures of the African American literary tradition, both concern the journey of a young, black, male protagonist, and both deal with the protagonist's racially charged quest for meaning and identity in early to mid-20th century America. But the parallels stop here when one considers the portrayal of women in each of these texts; such is the disparity, in fact, between the treatment of female characters in these two narratives that women actually occupy utterly divergent roles in each author's tale. The question of these novels' treatment of women is an important one to examine because any text that seeks, as these two novels do, to meaningfully explore the heritage, tradition, and journeys of a particular culture or people must obviously give, as a minimum, some degree of weight and meaning to the part played by women in those traditions and journeys. In Song of Solomon, women are not only significant to the plot but they are portrayed as essential to the protagonist's self-discovery and identity; in Invisible Man, conversely, the opposite portrayal is seen: female characters are represented as playing no meaningful part in the narrator's search for identity and are only important as figures in relation to the male characters. This paper will suggest that where Morrison's Song of Solomon uplifts, glorifies, and gives importance to women, Ellison's Invisible Man belittles, degrades, and marginalizes them; as strong as Morrison's positive portrayals of the importance of women in the protagonist's journey are, Ellison's negative portrayals of them are equally potent.
