In-class writing sample #1 (5 completion points)

HW: It's A Woman's World inferential questions...Write two textually-based interpretive/inferential questions about the poem.

Interpretive/inferential questions are questions about passages which strike you as important and they are open to interpretation. These differ from factual questions in that they may have more than one possible answer.

Well-written interpretive/inferential questions generally follow a format of an introduction/context, followed by a direct quote from a relevant portion of the text, and then a question or a cluster of questions which hint ask about and sometimes suggest different possible interpretations of the text.  Examples from some 2H texts are provided below:

1.  “After he has gone back, to wherever he’s going next, I think of getting him a star named after himself, for his birthday.  I have seen an advertisement for these: you send in your money, and you get a certificate with a star map, your own marked on it.  Possibly he would find this amusing.  But I’m not sure the word birthday, for him, would still have meaning (363).”  What might Elaine mean with this cryptic comment about the word “birthday”?  Is this comment connected to his speech on the universe?  Is the “star” as a “birthday” present significant in a symbolic way (suggesting, perhaps, Stephen as being a Christ-type) or just something a theoretical physicist might like?

2.  Elaine has endured pain through her whole life, though she never states it directly. In Chapter 57, Elaine begins to show that pain by giving it to others. "'You are cruel to me...Now he is right...I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this act of walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will" (350-351). Does Elaine release her pain through making others endure it as well? Why doesn't she give others the care and love she never truly experienced as a child? Does she have the need and desire to be better than everyone else?

Tayo used to carry around a tin frame of his mother when he was a child. "But one evening, when he carried it with him, there were visitors in the kitchen, she grabbed it away with him. He cried for it and Josiah came to comfort him; he asked Tayo why he was crying, but just as he was ashamed to tell Josiah about the understanding between him an Auntie, he also could not tell him about the picture..." (71). What would happen if Tayo tells Josiah? Why does Tayo feel the relationaship between himself and his aunt is private?  How might his  relationship with his Aunt  affect Tayo's view of his own mother?

On page 77, Auntie is cleaning her church shoes, and Tayo becomes curious about Auntie's motives for going to church: "Later on, Tayo wondered if she liked it that way, going to church by herself, where she could show the people that she was a devout Christian and not immoral or pagan like the rest of the family" (Silko 77). Does going to church act as an escape for Auntie or is it an authentic and natural extension of her beliefs? In terms of escape, does it allow her to distance herself from the rest of her family? And, finally, could it parallel Tayo's drinking as an escape from his problems after the war?