30.1. "The White Umbrella," Parents and Homeland

What are We Learning Today?
To refine our skills, we are practicing identifying and explaining figurative language in context.

How do today's activities fit into our lives?

We're in the middle of our thematic unit, (Mother, Father, Home)land, where our goals is to think carefully and clarify our ideas about the responsibilities and rights of parents, children, and the idea of "home" and "homeland." While the first section of the unit concerned those familial relationships, we want to shift our focus (though not change topic) to the related idea of homeland. These are the questions that I want to ask you to try to clarify in your mind:

• What does "homeland" mean?
• If your parents are from, say, Germany, but you moved to New Jersey as a baby, what's your homeland? If you were born in Jersey but your parents are from Ghana, can you say that you consider your homeland Ghana, even if you've never been there?
• Say you are born in a homeland, but you don't feel as though you fit there? Is it okay to reject your own homeland?
• If where you're from determines how you see the world, can you shake free from your homeland?

What Skill Are We Practicing Today?

Today, we're reading a short story, "The White Umbrella," and thinking about it. The story is a beautifully crafted one about a young girl struggling with exactly the same issues we wish to consider.

However, the story is one that functions a great deal on the level of metaphor. The narrator comes to an understanding that resolves her internal conflict (which is the same as to say that she learns the theme), but because the story is so symbolic, I found that many of my smart students would miss it. So, while the story goes here naturally thematically, we need to review how metaphor and symbol work. So, let's.

What You Need to Know to Help You Complete Your Work

1. One of the important characteristics of literary language is that it is figurative. Literal language means just what is says, e.g., "He is a poor teammate whose negative attitude is diminishing our team's chance to win games." If you looked up all the words in that sentence in the dictionary, you'd know what the sentence meant. Figurative language, though, requires that the reader make connections that aren't in the original meanings. "He's a cancer in the locker room," means the same thing as the first sentence, but if you looked up all of the words and took them to mean exactly what they said, the sentence wouldn't make any sense.
2. The basic kind of figurative language is metaphor, which says that "[THING 1] is [THING 2 THAT'S IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT CATEGORY]." Thing 1 and Thing 2 in the formula have a connection that the reader has to use creativity to figure out.
3. Sometimes, the connection is not perfectly clear between THING 1 and THING 2. Then, you can use the words "like" or "as" to make a simile, as in "his negative attitude is like a cancer in on our team." This is a little weaker than the original metaphor, but it's clearer. Similes are a great way to start using creative comparisons, though more confident writers usually like the stronger A=B; it's shorter and sharper.
4. Lastly, and most importantly for today is the toughest of all these things to spot. When a writer is telling a story, they something create a metaphor for an important invisible idea in that story, like the desire, a character's personality, the internal conflict, or the theme. All of these are invisible, but writers should show things in their stories. So, they make a metaphor and then place it inside the action of the story. For example, Lois Lowry wants to show that Jonas views the world in a more complicated, nuanced way than everybody else in The Giver. They all see the world as simple and clear and obvious, ruling out messy, ambiguous things like creativity, or love, or judgment. We would say that they see everything "in black and white." Lowry goes one step further and has the characters in the book literally (in the plot) see everything in black and white, but permits Jonas and the Giver to perceive color. Therefore, the colorblindness of the citizens is a symbol for their inability to understand the new, messier, richer world that Jonas comes to know.
5. When you write a symbol analysis, make it a paragraph long. First, simply state the perceivable thing in the story that is a symbol (this category is broad, so a character can be a symbol (a person is a kind of object) or anything that isn't an idea). Then, example its literal role in the plot, such as "Jonas's ability to see in color marks him as different and special, and is one of the reasons he is chosen to be the Receiver." Follow the symbol's journey through the entire story. Then, explain the symbolic meaning of the symbol.

The Text

So, "The White Umbrella" by Gish Jen. If you recognize the distinctive name of today's author, it might be because she was also the author of the review we read a couple weeks ago about Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Assignment

Choose a symbol from the story and write a symbol analysis of it in Google Drive.