Looking Beyond the Obvious Text.

Communism seemed to me, a cute idea. Everyone working collectively and equally with no hierarchy but it never seemed realistic. Antonio Gramsci’s views on hegemony seemed a bit more realistic. In many ways it seems to me the way we live today. We have a group of people who have imposed their moral, political and cultural values on us and we just went along. Of course as we all can see, even that didn’t work too well. Even if it seems that majority of the American people agreed to follow along with things like Christmas and Thanksgiving—there are still groups who want to count themselves out. Gramsci brought a Marxist point of view a bit more down to earth, but it still doesn’t seem to be able to work for all people.

When using a Marxist reading, I found that we can see the social issues and concerns. At first we would like at Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl, and think to our selves what a crazy mother, but she sure is funny. Later when you look down and under to the ideology held up by the mother, you realized how sad it has turned out for the both of them due to the social constraints that influenced such advice. The hegemony involved in Girl seems that a certain class had succeeded to persuade the mother in the story that morally her daughter will turn out to a slut and she is predestined to get pregnant before marriage and that she will have to be a wife one day and have to do certain things. The mother accepted a future for her daughter that was fed to them by society and she doesn’t seem to fight against it. There was never anything about how to go about becoming a doctor or lawyer incase she wants to. Everything revolved around cleaning and providing for someone else.

I think analyzing a piece of writing from a Marxist point of view is helpful in a way that you do not have to read something simply and accept it for what it is, you can look over all of that.