I bought The Conjure Woman from Amazon 1.5 months ago, because I wanted to get ahead and start reading some of the texts for this class. But when I opened the book and started reading for a bit, I felt dizzy -- yes, the language made me feel dizzy. I had trouble understanding the text. So, I stopped reading... and just waited till I need to read.
At first, I found it hard to make out some of the words, and I felt frustrated. But soon I realized that though I could not find the Standard English words for some, I had no problem understanding the text, because I could guess what the word would possibly mean in that context. I have to admit that reading The Conjure Woman is very time-consuming, because I have to read out loud the text in order to understand it. But after I finished this book, I found it very entertaining, not only because of the tales, but also because of the characters in this book.
Uncle Julius is clever. Every time he gives "advice" to his employer, he begins with a tale, and he always ends up getting some benefits from telling the tales. In Julius' tales, the slaves were constantly turned into something other than human-beings, and most of them had undergone some injuries as a result of that. To me, it's like Julius is actually saying how much the slaves had suffered under the mistreatmeant by their masters, as if they were not treated as human-beings. Nevertheless, in those tales, the slaves always beat their masters, so Julius' tales are like a warning to John and Annie.
Although the narrator, John, and his wife, Annie, always comment on those tales as "absurd, ridiculous, nonesense," etc, they nonetheless believe those tales, and seldom question Uncle Julius' real purpose of the telling. Both John and Annie seem to trust Uncle Julius too much, or, I would say they simply assume that Uncle Julius would not deceive them, because Uncle Julius is an ex-slave and he is supposed to be loyal and honest to white people. And with this assumption and their white superiority, John and Annie fail to see Julius' true purpose.
I wonder what the reception of this book was; since in the tales the blacks constantly beat the whites, and most of the audiences (if not all) were white, I wonder how they reacted to this book?
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5 comments:
Hi Wendy! Yeah, I'm enjoying the book too! I didn't have as much trouble reading it as I thought I would have. I'm surrounded with the dialect in the book all the time haha, so I try to not look too closely into the actual words but the thoughts that they express. I'm not done with the book yet so I can't comment on Uncle Julius's intentions, but so far John and Annie do seem to trust him very much. All right, see you in class!
Julius's speech has required some time on my part in order to understand as well. I also started the book early hoping to get a head start on it and gave up temporarily because of the frustrating language. I've found you get used to it, and once you become accustomed to the commonly used words it's far less obstructive to the reading
I am really enjoying Julius's tales. I haven't found the language too difficult to understand once I got used to it, but there are some words I still can't figure out. By the way, I think John and Annie trust Uncle Julius so much because of his friendliness and charm. They often bring up how much they like him; it seems Julius's charisma forces them to entertain his ideas.
I don't think John actually trusts Uncle Julius too much. John always has his doubts about Uncle Julius's true intentions, such as the first tale about the cursed vineyard. It seems as if Uncle Julius tries to deceive them in order to benefit in some way. Annie, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily believe Uncle Julius's stories, but she is able to see beyond of supernatural aspect of the tales. Unlike John, she is emotionally moved by the brutality of slavery.
I'm actually doing the same thing. I read the text outloud and it makes much more sense that way. I'm not so sure if Annie is more understanding to the tales of slavery. How do we know that Chesnutt is not just trying to portray Annie as a "gullible woman?"
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