The Formation of Identity

The yearning to categorize oneself in respect to others and form alliances is engrained in every person from a young age. It goes back to the sheer biology of human beings and the concept of strength in numbers. For this reason, much of the way we view ourselves is determined by the codes of the society in which we live. One’s value system and selection of life goals are all based in the attitudes around them, whether they are choosing to abide by those codes, rebel against them, or take a middle stance, no one is completely unaffected by the mindset of the culture in which they live.

For this reason, most people spend a good deal of their lives exploring how they view themselves and the dynamic way in which that is affected by what label or title has been attached to their character by those around them. This is a struggle that begins the moment we are born, but it is not until later on that we realize the extent to which the customs we are born into shape the way we will choose to continue structuring ourselves and our personalities for the rest of our lives. Only so much of who we are and desire to become is explicitly of our choosing.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie spent her formative years immersed in a culture vastly different from the one with which she is expected to identify. She tells Phoeby, “Ah was wid dem white chillun so much till Ah didn’t know Ah wuzn’t white till Ah was round six years old.” (8 ) She grew up in a world of race delineations, but she was largely immune to their effects up to the point she started school. She is then rudely tossed out into the adult world on pages 12 – 14, with Nanny marrying her off to Logan Killicks for the sake of “protection” (15) with the warning, “De nigger woman is the mule uh the world so fur as Ah can see.” (14) However, not too long after Janie marries Logan, Jody shows up and tells her, “A pretty doll-baby lak you is made to sit on de front porch and rock and fan yo’self and eat p’taters that other folks plant just special for you.”(29) These two ideas are more than contradictory in Janie’s head. She feels the pull of both worlds and doesn’t know how to mesh that with her version of herself and her current goals.

A similar situation is found in The House of Mirth through Lily’s upbringing in the richest strata of society and then her decline into enormous debt while still trying to maintain her membership in a culture built solely on monetary value. She knows how to survive and progress only in the scope of the world in which she was raised, and when all circumstances try to force her out of it, she has to become more independent and fight back. She knows that she can buy her way back into the highest strata on her last valuable commodity – her beauty. The problem with becoming too conspicuously independent is that self-sufficiency is a trait common to “governesses—or widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!”(22) That is the standard which has been imposed on her by hegemony, and until she can break from those societal codes, she will never be free. Just as she described to Selden in discussing his cousin, Gerty Farish, “She likes being good, and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not.” (23) This all stems from the fact that Gerty is viewed as such an anomaly in that society and it is recognized that she threw in the towel on the whole game of marriage years ago. She chose for herself a different path.

Lily knows that if she is to continue to define herself by the standards of a society in which she does not take part, she will come up short. The naturalist character in her feels pushed to conform to the society around her, but the realist character sees the opportunity to branch out and obtain a new standard by which to judge herself. It is a hard decision which Lily does not have the courage to make, so she justifies her indecision by deflecting blame on to the mass of society. “I never had any choice. There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit.” (105-106) So Lily continues on in the direction she began, despite her feeling of inadequacy concerning the culture. She cries out to Selden during their conversation under the tree that fateful Sunday afternoon, “Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?” (110) showing that she knows she has chosen her own path and that her despair is of her own doing as well as exploiting her dislike of her current situation and her desire to escape from it.

But the path you choose for yourself is really chosen by those who influence you from your earliest recollections of life. When Janie tells Phoeby, “Dey all useter call me Alphabet ‘cause so many people had done named me different names,” (9) she is revealing a sense of nonidentity from early childhood. No one quite knew what to call her, so they resorted to the most all-encompassing term they could conceive. A name like “Alphabet” is complex in that it can represent every name known to man, and, yet it does not assign a distinct character or personality. In a way, those children are eradicating what little identity she had managed to forge by the young age of six.

In addition to this, Janie grew up with Nanny’s influence in lieu of her mother’s, which tends to cause a lag in the passing of culture, and it doesn’t always get passed correctly. Parents pass on to their children what they learned from their parents, utilizing techniques they view as effective and avoiding ones they don’t (in general). But when you have a generational skip, as in this case, you have a young woman brought up according outdated societal codes, which causes a discrepancy between what the child learns at home and what the child learns from their peers. Nanny’s emphasis on values learned from slavery is important in many ways, but will not affect Janie in the same way in which it affected Janie’s mother due to the lapse in time and the progression of society therein. This causes Janie to be a bit more rebellious toward Nanny than would be expected of her in relation to her mother, contributing to her statement in Eatonville that “[s]he hated her grandmother and had hidden it from herself all these years under a cloak of pity.” ( 89)r statement more rebellious toward Nanny than would be expected of her in relation to her mother, contributi

Lily shares a similar experience in that with the death of her parents at such an impressionable and young age, she is left to be passed from relative to relative, and with her proven inability to stand on her own two feet, she becomes so vulnerable that her opinion of herself is simply a conglomeration of the opinions of others, with almost no realist core. The attitudes of Aunt Peniston in relation to the societal expectations imposed on Lily were in disaccord. She does not support Lily playing bridge, though Judy expects it of her. (49) She does not do much in the way of getting Lily married off, as is the custom. (65) Aunt Peniston is not Lily’s mother and therefore does not feel the obligation to see to her well-being that comes with parenthood, which is ultimately exemplified through her disinheriting of Lily on page 316.

A major part of both of the worlds in which these two strikingly different women were raised is the emphasis on marriage and its role in the definition of a woman and in her social establishment. For Janie, marriage is a quest to find herself and to find her balance between society’s expectations and her own, which is certainly not an easy journey. She begins by marrying Logan at 16 upon Nanny’s behest out of concern for Janie’s future. This is where Nanny’s slavery background affects Janie to a much larger degree than was really necessary. Nanny is concerned about her granddaughter being taken advantage of and becoming ostracized and a fugitive like her mother. She doesn’t want to see Janie put through the same struggles, so she pushes Janie into a marriage for which she is not quite prepared.

Up until her marriage to Logan, Janie’s idea of marriage was a partnership of love, but she knew from the beginning that she did not love Logan Killicks. She laments to Nanny at one point, “Ah wants to want him sometimes. Ah don’t want him to do all de wantin’…. Ah wants sweet things wid mah marriage lak when you sit under a pear tree and think.” (23-24) This is a turning point in Janie’s life because it changes the way she views herself in many ways. She has gone from knowing herself as someone who will enter a lifelong partnership with a man who values her for who she is and have a “happily-ever-after” life to realizing that she is married to a man who sees her as an object and that she will never have that sense of freedom if she continues down that path. “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”(25)

Lily goes through the same steps, except through a different value system. At the beginning of the book, she feels that she must marry and she must marry wealthy. She views it as her default state, as though there is no alternative, as shown through her discussion with Selden when he asks, “Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?” to which she responds, “I suppose so. What else is there?” (26) He brings up the state of his cousin, Gerty Farish, but Lily rejects that idea offhand as representing a lifestyle she could never see herself endorsing. “She was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.” (48 ) She views her need to marry as being derived from her gender. She puts it to Selden very matter-of-factly in saying “A girl must [marry], a man may if he chooses.” (29) which goes back to the way she was raised that the man will work (or provide money in some other manner) and the lady will spend it. The whole point of marriage was to move up in society. There was no love factor in it, which is why Lily originally gravitated toward Gryce. But the problem was that “[s]he had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.” (101) And that man was not Percy Gryce. This was the moment Lily made her first meaningful realist decision, but it was one that would lead to many more.

Self-image is based on a sequence of events, not just one, no matter how important. When Janie met Jody and left Logan, she followed him to Eatonville where she encountered a completely different community from the one in which she was raised. Eatonville was an all-black community that was more or less self-sufficient. The people who lived there had a laid-back way of life that Jody could not help but exploit. Jody’s need to control everything around him applied just as much, if not more so, to his wife. He feels the need to confine her to the store and to ensure her hair is covered all the time. He does not tolerate things he cannot control. One night he breaks down and slaps Janie and at that point she realizes that her idea of him is not accurate and her idea of their marriage is not accurate. This was a major milestone and it caused her to develop a whole new philosophy on life. “She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” (72)

Lily Bart, on the other hand, held this view from the beginning. Selden’s exclamation of “That is how she looks when she is alone!”(106) exposes the ostentatious nature of the culture in which they live. She could not show her true colors at the risk of not performing in a socially-acceptable manner. Her actions are based on what society expects of her. She cannot allow herself to smoke during her pursuit of Percy Gryce because “it is not considered becoming in a jeune fille à marier; and at the present moment I am a jeune fille à marier .” (107) The society puts such an emphasis on the outer performance, that it almost drains the realist character out of a person. The structure of it all was so rigid that it really forced naturalism upon its inhabitants. With someone standing over you all the time, telling you how much money to spend how often on which items, as well as how to spend every instant of your time, truly does not allow for much in the way of “discovering oneself”. Take, for instance, Lily’s performance in the tableaux vivants, which further showed her knowledge of the encroaching close on her marketability. Ned Van Alstyne summed up the underlying feelings of the crowd quite well in saying, “Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!” (196) there were so many expectations for her to meet, how was she to be expected to form her own?

Janie escaped from this, however, when Tea Cake entered her life. His free soul that was the opposite of everything she had been through up to that point and he could therefore provide a unique perspective on her situation. He allowed her to be herself enough to explore who exactly it was that she had become and who she wanted to be. With Tea Cake, Janie always had options, and it is the ability to make choices in one way or another that causes us to form our personalities. Without the choices we make, we are all the same.

And Lily had some tough choices to make. When she discovered that Selden was sleeping with Bertha Dorset and that he had not properly disposed of the evidence (154), it created an epic moral dilemma between the naturalist character in her and the realist character. The force of society was telling her to use this God-given information to her advantage and destroy Bertha as no one else had ever had the power to, but at the same time, Lily could not bring herself to stoop to the level of a population she so despised. And it was not helping things that the letters were from Lawrence Selden, of all people. She had the choice to follow her heart to Selden (who may ultimately reject her anyway, as far as she knows) or to buy her way back into the society which has thrown her to the dogs. Her ultimate decision to destroy the letters reveals much about the development of her morals throughout the book.

Over the course of these novels, both Janie and Lily learned a lot about themselves, what society expected of them, and what mattered to them in terms of society’s expectations for them. Janie moved from a world in which “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” (1) and the wishes and desires of women were determined by those of the men with whom they were affiliated to “pull[ing] in her horizon like a great fish-net,” (193) and becoming her own determined individual. Lily, after a fierce inner struggle of her own, reflected to Selden, “I remembered you saying that such a life could never satisfy me; and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could.” (433) On the other hand, it obviously could not, as in the end, she contemplates suicide and whether or not she actually acts on it is quite irrelevant as she does die and leaves all inner conflict behind. Janie’s ending is a bit more ambiguous, but she was bitten by her rabid husband, and she seems to be at peace with who she has become and ready to die, in a sense. After her moment of self-actualization, “She called in her soul to come and see.” (193) The renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow, who devised the hierarchy of needs, the capstone of which being self-actualization, once conjectured that only two percent of people reach the top. Others are content enough right before or upon arrival, that they can just succumb to nature and die happy.

It was over for both of them, though in no way a perfect, happily-ever-after ending, it was an ending all the same. Janie had proved to herself that she could stand on her own two feet and did not need a man to define her. She was content. She knew that “uh nigger woman is de freest thing on earth.” (189) Lily had proved to herself that she had power over the world in which “[s]he was so evidently the victim of the civilization that had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.” (23) The inner struggles were over; they knew who they were, and it was time to die.

~ by fighterjock on 26 April 2008.