Today, we talked about Gaines' use of local color and Regionalism to create verisimilitude in A Lesson Before Dying. Select a passage from this novel that you think most presents this local color and helps to increase the novel's verisimilitude. Quote that passage and tell us what in it you truly could hear or visualize. ( The deadline to post a response is midnight, Friday, January 17, 2014.)
Thursday, January 16, 2014
A Pinch of Salt in the Gumbo
Today, we talked about Gaines' use of local color and Regionalism to create verisimilitude in A Lesson Before Dying. Select a passage from this novel that you think most presents this local color and helps to increase the novel's verisimilitude. Quote that passage and tell us what in it you truly could hear or visualize. ( The deadline to post a response is midnight, Friday, January 17, 2014.)
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"Miss Emma put rice in each pan, then she poured gumbo over the rice until the pan was nearly full. Besides the shrimps, she had put smoked sausage and chicken in the gumbo, and she had seasoned it well with green onions, file, and black pepper. Gumbo was something you could always eat.." pg 189. Although it is what we talked about during class, I think that the most important local color in this novel is presented through the food. Throughout the novel the food that Miss Emma cooks for Jeferson is emphasized every time. Almost all the food mentioned in A Lesson Before Dying is customary to the South; while reading it I could picture these preparations sitting on a neighbors table.
Another thing that I think adds local color to this novel is the excess of Southern hospitality. When a visitor comes over the characters are always offering some coffee or something of the sort. Through Gaines words the hospitality is easily detected.
"A statue of a Confederate soldier stood to the right of the walk that led up to the courthouse door. Above the head of the statue, national, state, and Confederate flags flew on long metal poles..." pg. 68-69. In A Lesson Before Dying, I think the local color can be seen in a great amount of the scenery in the novel. I mean, a statue honoring a Confederate soldier would never be in the North. Gaines' use of visual scenery, like that of the sugar cane fields, or the pecan trees, or even the quarter and the plantation house, adds to the local color so perfectly. The vivid scenery makes a obvious picture the south with its Pecan trees and Confederate statues and flags. Gaines' does an incredible job detailing it out so well that while reading it, I felt like I could walk out my front door and see these things in my front yard.
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