Stations for Desiree’s Baby
RL 11.1: Cite strong and thorough evidence to support analysis of what the text specifically says as well as inferences
RL 11.3: Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story or drama (e.g., where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed). [Irony, Tone, Symbolism, Character development, theme]
RL 11.6: Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the context and style of a text.
Day 1 – Read the story in class. Use close reading strategies with post-it notes. If student has his/her own copy of the story, he/she can highlight and annotate.
Day 2 –
Stations. In groups of 4, students will rotate through assigned 3 stations and chose a 4th of the remaining stations. Each group will spend 10 minutes at a station completing each activity. The teacher will have a timer go off every 10 minutes with a one minute interval for changing stations.
Station 1 – Symbolism and Tone. There will be computer paper, markers, and colored pencils at the station. On a notecard will be the following:
Students will draw a scene or important symbol or that demonstrates a strong tone from “Desiree’s Baby” and write a quote from the story under the picture that shows that symbol or tone. Make sure that everyone’s name is on the picture.
Station2 – Historical Context. There will be a copy of the “One Drop Rule” essay at the station and some computer paper. On a notecard will be the following:
Read the essay. Discuss the main ideas of the essay and then make connections between the historical significance of the essay and “Desiree’s Baby.” How does the One Drop Rule affect your understanding of the character’s motivations? Jot down your ideas on a sheet of paper and put the group names on the paper.
Station 3 - Literary Theory and Theme. At the station will be short blurbs on Realism and on Naturalism and a T graph on butcher paper. On a notecard will be the following:
Students will read the Realism vs. Naturalism blurbs. Debate whether “Desiree’s Baby is Realism or Naturalism. Once the group decides, mark on the T graph your choice and cite a quote (evidence) from the story that supports your group’s answer.
Final Reflection: Students will write a short paragraph explaining what they have learned from the text and the stations. Specifically, they will react to the ending, discuss what they believe the primary theme to be, and how historical context plays a role in understanding a work of literature.
To be considered black in the United States not even half of one's ancestry must be African black. But will one-fourth do, or one-eighth, or less? The nation's answer to the question 'Who is black?" has long been that a black is any person with any known African black ancestry. This definition reflects the long experience with slavery and later with Jim Crow segregation. In the South it became known as the "one-drop rule,'' meaning that a single drop of "black blood" makes a person a black. It is also known as the "one black ancestor rule," some courts have called it the "traceable amount rule," and anthropologists call it the "hypo-descent rule," meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group. This definition emerged from the American South to become the nation's definition, generally accepted by whites and blacks. Blacks had no other choice. As we shall see, this American cultural definition of blacks is taken for granted as readily by judges, affirmative action officers, and black protesters as it is by Ku Klux Klansmen.Let us not he confused by terminology. At present the usual statement of the one-drop rule is in terms of "black blood" or black ancestry, while not so long ago it referred to "Negro blood" or ancestry. The term "black" rapidly replaced "Negro" in general usage in the United States as the black power movement peaked at the end of the 1960s, but the black and Negro populations are the same. The term "black" is used in this book for persons with any black African lineage, not just for unmixed members of populations from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "Negro," which is used in certain historical contexts, means the same thing. Terms such as "African black," "unmixed Negro," and "all black" are used here to refer to unmixed blacks descended from African populations.
We must also pay attention to the terms "mulatto" and "colored." The term "mulatto" was originally used to mean the offspring of a "pure African Negro" and a "pure white." Although the root meaning of mulatto, in Spanish, is "hybrid," "mulatto" came to include the children of unions between whites and so-called "mixed Negroes." For example, Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, with slave mothers and white fathers, were referred to as mulattoes. To whatever extent their mothers were part white, these men were more than half white. Douglass was evidently part Indian as well, and he looked it. Washington had reddish hair and gray eyes. At the time of the American Revolution, many of the founding fathers had some very light slaves, including some who appeared to be white. The term "colored" seemed for a time to refer only to mulattoes, especially lighter ones, but later it became a euphemism for darker Negroes, even including unmixed blacks. With widespread racial mixture, "Negro" came to mean any slave or descendant of a slave, no matter how much mixed. Eventually in the United States, the terms mulatto, colored, Negro, black, and African American all came to mean people with any known black African ancestry. Mulattoes are racially mixed, to whatever degree, while the terms black, Negro, African American, and colored include both mulattoes and unmixed blacks. As we shall see, these terms have quite different meanings in other countries.
Whites in the United States need some help envisioning the American black experience with ancestral fractions. At the beginning of miscegenation between two populations presumed to be racially pure, quadroons appear in the second generation of continuing mixing with whites, and octoroons in the third. A quadroon is one-fourth African black and thus easily classed as black in the United States, yet three of this person's four grandparents are white. An octoroon has seven white great-grandparents out of eight and usually looks white or almost so. Most parents of black American children in recent decades have themselves been racially mixed, but often the fractions get complicated because the earlier details of the mixing were obscured generations ago. Like so many white Americans, black people are forced to speculate about some of the fractions-- one-eighth this, three-sixteenths that, and so on....
Realism
Realism doesn't become the dominant literary style in the U.S. till the 1870s.
Characteristics of Realism:
· Realism tries hard (just like its name suggests) to present the world as it really is -- the way, for instance, a photograph might capture it. Howells writes that "realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material." Since it tries so hard to be truthful, realist literature, unlike much of the "romantic" writing that preceded it, never feels overblown, the way a fairy tale or a parable or a dream might. And it's rarely sentimental or emotional. It just reads like a plain and sensible account of whatever action it's describing.
· This concern with delivering plain and simple truth leads realists to fill their works with details drawn from everyday life, or "facts," we might as well call them. They can be facts about domestic life, about families and genealogies, about history, about politics, about business and finance, about geographical places.... Whatever. Realists, generally speaking, don't write about extraordinary people in fantastic situations. They write about plain, normal, everyday folks dealing with the trials and tribulations of plain, normal, everyday life.
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· Realism generally celebrates the individual. Most realist works feature a central character who has to deal with some moral struggle, hopefully to arrive at an important moral victory or realization before the story's over. And this, relatedly, often means much of the "action" in realist lit is internal action: we hear lots about what's going on in the central character's head; we learn a lot about his or her psychology. Since realist characters live in the "everyday" world, interesting external things aren't always happening -- so the "internal" stuff has to take up the slack. One way or the other, though, realist writers are fascinated by individuals: they love the idea that single human beings must learn, grow, and change their worlds -- or be held responsible for not doing these things.
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· One last thing: realist works are generally plot driven, even if only subtly. This means they pivot around conflicts we as readers want to see resolved. A realist work, then, will typically have at least one protagonist (a main character -- not necessarily a likeable person or a "hero") and one antagonist (another character or a force that will try to prevent the protagonist from getting what s/he wants), and readers will wait to see, as they watch a sequence of increasingly dramatic events, which of them prevails.
Naturalism
Naturalism is an outgrowth of realism. Like realism, it wants to present an almost photographically accurate version of "real" life. It's full of facts and details about an everyday world ordinary people may well recognize. Its characters speak the same dialects real Americans speak. And it's generally plot driven.
So how is naturalism distinguishable from the realism that comes before it? Well....
· Naturalist writers aren't interested in individuality the way the realists are. They don't think it's the individual's place to change the world, and whatever moral struggle s/he goes through may very well add up to little or nothing. Naturalism's central belief, in fact, is that individual human beings are at the mercy of uncontrollable larger forces that originate both inside and outside them. These forces might include some of our more "animal" drives, such as the need for food, sex, shelter, social dominance, etc. Or, in a more "external" vein, these forces might include the natural environment, the man-made environment, or finance, industry, and the economy. Something, though, is always beating down and controlling the lives of lowly individual humans in naturalist works. The whole point of this literary movement, in fact, is that this is inevitable. And yes, it's often pretty grim.
· Naturalist works are more likely to be political than traditional realist works. It may, on one level, be inevitable that money will crush poor people, but it might also be true, these writers suggest, that we shouldn't turn a blind eye to it -- that we should, maybe, start thinking about bigger-than-the-individual political movements (like socialism) that can counter capitalism's exploitation of the poor.
· Naturalist works are more likely than realist works to deal with extraordinary (that is, beyond-the-ordinary) subject matter. In their desire to show how larger forces control and manipulate people, naturalist works often deal with subjects most comfortable middle-class readers wouldn't consider part of their ordinary lives: war, violence, crime, natural disaster, urban squalor, poverty.
DoCarmo, Dr. “Dr. DoCarmo’s Notes on Realism and Naturalism.” Bucks University. Web. 30 Ocotober 2012.