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            Billy Beede is not the only narrator made available throughout the journey to Willa Mae’s body. By diving into different character’s minds, Parks gives her readers a more complex understanding of Billy Beede and the circumstances she finds herself in. Parks externalizes the reader’s point of view instead of providing a story based solely on Billy’s bias; by doing so, she provides an opportunity for the reader to obtain a lifelike and realistic representation version of the events. Parks specifically uses this tactic in moments that dramatize and exemplify Billy’s behavior. Using the current narrator’s ignorance, the audience is able to grasp a new angle of Billy because of the outside view in.

In Suzan Lori-Parks novel, Getting Mother’s Body, Billy Beede stresses her desire to be her own person and maintain no connection with, her mother, Willa Mae’s reputation. Despite her desire to be free from her mother’s shadow, Billy still uses tricks that her mother used. These tricks, for example looking for holes or the ring trick, were used by Willa Mae to get what she wanted. While Billy tries to deny her similarity to her mother, their connection and overlapping characters are undeniable and she only increases their similarities throughout the book. However, Billy continues to deny the similarities because she is afraid to become her mother.

A question that arose after reading Suzan- Lori Park’s “Getting Mother’s Body” was: do readers enter contact zones every time they pick up a book? In "Arts of the Contact Zones", Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power…”(Pratt 34). Readers react differently as they bring their own experiences as well as cultures and backgrounds when reading a piece of work. In this case I, the reader, am a middle class Asian American reading a story set in the 1960s with lower class, black characters. As a result, the environments along with the way of life these characters live are drastically different from mine.

Vivian O’Bannon

Jody Cohen

Emily Balch Seminar: Changing Our Story

October 28, 2016

Gender: A Complex Trait to Inherit

Suzan-Lori Parks takes on many controversial issues in her novel Getting Mother’s Body: abortion, race, socioeconomic status, homosexuality, and countless other topics are explored throughout the work. One of these important matters is that of female subordination. Two of the main characters in the novel, Billy Beede and her Aunt June, find their lives dictated by men, and share a common struggle to regain control of their respective paths. In Getting Mother’s Body, June’s arranged marriage and Billy’s unplanned pregnancy highlight the issue of women being subordinated and controlled by men.

           The novel “Getting Mother’s Body” by Suzan-Lori Parks focuses on the members of the Beede family, who are notorious for their bad luck, and all that they are able to achieve in spite of it . Throughout “Getting Mother’s Body” various characters often use the Beedes’ reputation as a punchline, and this element of humor makes it more difficult to pin down the nature of Beedeism. Beedes are poor, undignified, unlucky, the kind of people who bury treasure in the ground and are always able to scam their way into getting what they want. That list was derived mainly from comments of non-Beedes, like Dill Smiles, and Beedes-in-denial like Estelle Beede Rochfoucault. The Beedes understand themselves a bit differently.

Blood is thicker than water.  True, but culture, era, structure, class, all matter when dealing with the complexity of a family’s relationship.  Last week I discussed the importance of Willa Mae Beede’s songs in Getting Mothers Body, and this week I want to understand the importance of Yummy’s letters to her parents in All Over Creation.  This analysis is much more complex than what I thought the purpose of Willa Mae’s songs were because Yummy’s character is more complex in the culture she was raised in, time she was raised, family structure and her family’s economic status.

One of the most prominent features of the novel Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan-Lori Parks is that it is strikingly similar to As I Lay Dying, the famous stream of consciousness novel by William Faulkner. The stories are, in fact, almost identical. It is quite bold to model your debut novel after a so famous and widely critiqued novel, and the reasoning behind such a choice is not quite certain. However, Parks’ modeling of her own story after Faulkner’s serves to highlight the motivation that drives Billy Beede to change her fate, as well as the struggles that the Beede family must endure due to their race.

Jessie Zong

Web Paper 7

Mother-Daughter Complications

In Suzan-Lori Park’s “Getting Mother’s Body,” she explores the complexity of mother-daughter relationships through Billy Beede and her dead mother, Willa Mae. Billy expresses extreme hatred towards her mother, however, as much as Billy is trying to push herself away from her mother’s identity, she is slowly becoming her mother.