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And Daddy would chuckle. Pat your cheek. He was always as shy with his love as you were ferocious with yours, but even if its expression was tentative, the fact of his love was absolute. Then. So what the fuck happened? It wasn’t your fault! you wanted to cry. It was just life, filtering into your prattle at the supper table, that so offended him, and how were you to know? You’d always shared what you’d learned in school, playing teacher even then, telling him all about the Pilgrims, for example, or how the telegraph was invented, or the names for the parts of a flower. “Pistil, stamen, stigma . . .” He’d frown with concentration, repeating the names after you, slowly, as though he’d never heard them before. “And what does a stamen do?” he’d prompt, pretending to be confused.

 For last week’s paper, I analyzed the relationship between Billy Beed and her mother, Willa Mae. I claimed the Billy Beede is gradually getting her mother’s body, which means she gets lots of traits from her mother because of some shared living environment and some similar life experience. Besides getting the body of her own mother, she is also getting the body, as well as the mind, of a mature woman. Though Billy Beede may not want to admit, she does have some obvious link with her mother.

"'Honey I know how you feel.'

She elbowed him aside. No, she thought. You don't. She broke the eggs one by one into a bowl, beat them, and lit a fire under the skillet. That was the problem. He didn't know how she felt at all." (Ozeki 207)

"'Listen,' he said, 'I'm really sorry…'

'Yeah well I'm sorry, too… I'm sorry you had to flake out on me. Are those ready to go?'

Geek nodded.

I looked down at the spindly shoots, grown from Momoko's seed. Cucurbita pepo. Warted gourds. I carred them out into the sun to harden." (Ozeki 234)

“People will talk. Let them talk. I can bear it. I am a Beede so I can bear the people talking…. I guess what Billy do or don’t do, or what she get or don’t get, is no more than just part of the plan” (51). So reflects Roosevelt Beede, accepting the decisions of his willful, pregnant, unmarried niece, Billy. Roosevelt’s stiff lipped, resigned response to his family’s luck is typical of the characters in Susan Lori Park’s novel. Throughout ‘Getting Mother’s Body’ the poor, Texan family comments on what it means to be a Beede, as they travel to Arizona to retrieve the remains of Billy’s mother and the jewels supposedly buried with her.

Getting Out of Shadow

            Orally, when people say we are so much like our parents, we may argue, but we usually do not deny that we are influenced by our parents. Animals brought up by their parents share many similarities with their parents when they are hunting, playing, and fighting etc. Same as human. The gesture we holding chopsticks, the way we folding socks, and the style of speaking are more or less passed down from our parents.

While I have been reading Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation, I’ve been thinking about maternity and parenting. This theme, which carries over from Getting Mother’s body, emerges through many of Ozeki’s characters. Yumi leaves home because she feels like her parents, Lloyd and Momoko, do not understand her lifestyles. As a result, she lives most of her life without the roles of parents in her life. The way in which Yumi parents her own kids has many dynamics as well. She doesn’t seem to show a lot of love, and Cass’s character to contrast this. Although she and Will have been unable to have kids of their own, Cass is the most loving toward Yumi’s children, especially Poo.

Some people receive their characteristics from genetics, but their identity could also come from other places. A person’s identity can from their family, because usually they are the ones who influence their beliefs and values. Then their beliefs and values usually determine how they are as a person. There are people who do not want to be like the rest of their family, and diverge to create their own identity. In Susan-Lori Parks novel, Getting Mother’s Body, the town expects Billy to turn out just like her family specifically her mother, but she proves them wrong. Similarly, Yumi in All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki, goes against what that her parents expected her to have.

In the context of the relations between Dill and other characters, how is Dill’s identity represented and explored throughout the novel?

Tolerance without labels

Gender as a social concept in America underwent dramatic change in the 1960s for women and men. At the start of the decade the ideal American family  was centered around rigid roles consisting of the “Breadwinning father, [the] stay-at-home mother and [their] children.” There was major progressive change in the roles of the specific genders at the start of the second wave of feminism,  but while the roles changed genders did not. With the publication of the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and the increase of women in the workforce, progress for the female sex was become tangible, but unfortunately this did not translate to those outside of the cisnormative binaries.

The Intertwined Minds of Lori-Parks and Ozeki