Essay on "Family Traditions"

Essay 3 pages (1051 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

" This voice is reflecting back on the people who came before her and in comparing herself to those ancestors she finds herself lacking. Her grandmothers were able to use their muscles and work in the land. They were physically strong and by extension mentally strong because they were able to perform these labors in order to support their families without giving way to despair over their own retarded ambitions. Unlike her grandmothers, this narrator does not believe she is living wholly. The scents and sounds she equates with the grandmothers indicate lives that were fully lived. She however, laments that she is not strong like her grandmothers. It is unclear if she is despairing because she has not lived up to her potential, or if she is emotionally weak, but she looks upon herself as less than those who came before. This can be an important part of familial custom and tradition because it is common that if someone in your family was powerful or had achieved some level of success either in the home or in the larger world, the pressure will be upon you to match their success or indeed surpass them. It is clear that this narrator does not believe herself capable of this and has given up.

Unlike the other two narratives which deal with the pain of differentiating between traditional family customs and the individual, Heaney's work is focused on the happy combination of tradition and ambition. Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging" has a narrator who is watching his father from his window where he is writing while his father performs manual labor in the garden. The narrator's father gardens with his spade just as other members of their family did before them. They are a family of diggers, of men who work with their hands, until the narrator who is different. This narrator realizes that he is different from the men in his family in that he writes rather than labors manually, but he also relates to them because he says that he will use his pen to dig; that is to say, he will do his work with his pen but with the same skill and dedication as his forefathers. He shows that you can respect the traditions of his kinsmen without following directly in their footsteps. The narrator honors his family tradition by working hard rather than by doing precisely as they did.

The three different works show different perspectives on the conflict of heritage and individuality. The stronger a person's familial culture, the more pressure is upon the individual to agree with that culture and take part of it. Alice and Margaret Walker seem to think that the customs of the family must be taken up or else a person risks isolating themselves from the family. Heaney on the other hand believes that a person can embrace the virtues of the family while still obtaining their own individual identity.

Works Cited:

James, Missy & Alan P. Merickel. Reading Literature and Writing Argument. 5th ed. Upper

Saddle River: Pearson-Prentice Hall,… READ MORE

How to Reference "Family Traditions" Essay in a Bibliography

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