Shaping Identities
Emmalee Waite
Identity is the condition of being a specified person or thing. Identity is continuously evolving as we grow. Identity is often changed less by us and more by our peers and other outside influences. During this unit, there were several stories that displayed this idea, however, I will mainly be talking about Through the Tunnel by Doris Lessing, Reading while Incarcerated, by Christopher Blackwell, and Zolaria, by Catilin Horrocks.
“...I didn’t want to feel like the most ignorant person in the room.”; “Practically every author I have encountered while in prison… played a role in my efforts to grow and become a better person…” These quotes, derived from the news article Reading While Incarcerated, show how peer pressure and literature affected Christopher Blackwell while he was in jail, prompting him to turn his life around entirely. This story brought up a specific book, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, by Michael Kimmel. This book, as its name suggests, talks about Toxic Masculinity and how it affects people. It also helps people understand why this mentality is there and ways to avoid acting in a way that would be described as “Toxic Masculinity”. Blackwell furthers his point by describing his own home life, which he describes as “abusive” and “consumed by gangs, drugs, and gang violence”. He talks about how the book Angry White Men helped him understand why he turned to violence and ways and reasons for him to turn away from violence.
Similarly, in Doris Lessing’s Through the Tunnel, we see another character undergoing a profound transformation. A young English boy called Jerry. The change could be considered physical, as he has learned to better exercise his lungs, but much of the change happened mentally, and changed his identity as a whole. In the beginning of this tale, we see Jerry as a boy, eleven years old and wild and free. Jerry, at the start, shows impatience and a very childish outlook, which can be shown when the story “‘I want some swimming goggles,’ he panted, defiant and beseeching.” This single line of dialogue shows an impatience and childishness in the way he was “defiant and beseeching”, which is something that an immature child would say to an adult. However, later in the text, we see his maturity in a different interaction with his mother. We see his growth as the text explains how his mother was expecting a battle of wills, and shows how she was determined and prepared to put her foot down, but it wasn’t needed as he accepted, acting extremely mature for his age. Similarly, in this text, we are able to see his journey through maturity, brought up by his resolute actions in attempting to make it through the rocky tunnel. Through this time, he discovers that he will, in fact, get better at something through practice, something many kids struggle to understand. Jerry goes through hurdle after hurdle while swimming in the ocean, before eventually training himself to be able to swim through the rocks.
In the short story Zolaria, by Catilin Horrocks, we see another example of outside forces affecting identity, although this time through trauma. The trauma in question is when our main character loses her best friend to cancer. She begins to blame herself for messing with a monster of their own imaginings, which she decided to blame her best friend's cancer on. As she grows up, she remains somewhat largely unaffected by it, remembering the monster, Ogan Veen, but not really caring. In her mind, Ogan Veen was searching for revenge and to hurt and that is why her friend gained cancer. She moved through life trying to not feel the guilt or the fear, until one day she has two girls of her own. “She is the perceptive one, I will think, the one who reads people. And then I will think, please no, not her. And then I will think, please no, I didn’t mean the other one.” She clearly has trauma with the death of her friend, constantly comparing her twin daughters to her and her friend. She constantly thinks about how her friend died, and how she doesn’t want her daughters to suffer the same fate.
This also affects her personal life, keeping her trapped in the past a little, and unable to let go of her imagination. She keeps treating Ogan Veen as a real person and someone who very well could take away her daughters or anyone close to her, treating him as some sort of god. This idealism impacts her relationship with people around her, specifically her husband's mother, who asked whether she’s “really Unitarian or just in need a cheap place for the wedding.” This question is likely spawned from her imagination and her idealization and fear of an imaginary being called Ogan Veen.
The reason these stories are tied so closely to the idea of shifting identity is because whether it be a change caused by literature and other pop culture, by peer pressure, or by their own imagination, people and their worldviews are almost always changing and growing, whether it be for better or for worse.