A Dream Deferred
What happens to ?
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over- like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
While Langhston Hughes authors this poem, A Dream Deferred, it can easily be interpreted as Toni Morrison's description of Nel and her life of sorrow and dissatisfaction. Sula and Nel, the protagonists in Toni Morrison's Sula, are each the only daughters of mothers whose distance leaves the young girls with dreams to erase this solitude and loneliness. There is no question that Sula alleviates this aloneness with a lascivious and experimental life, "I'm going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this ...
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shame at her own Creole mother's libidinous lifestyle. Her mother's submissiveness and humiliation evokes a fear, an anger, and an energy in Nel. Her emotions intensify as she makes a declaration to never be her mother, to never compromise her individuality, "I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me"(28). Figuring that her "me-ness" will take her far, she exclaims "I want...I want to be... wonderful"(29). However, that trip to Louisiana "was the last as well as the first time she was ever to leave Medallion"(29).
Initially, Nel's self-declaration empowers her to pursue that dream of independence. She gathers power and joy, and "the strength to cultivate a friend in spite of mother"(29). Nel achieves a degree of her self-described "me-ness," her dream, a separation from her subservient and disgraceful mother, resulting in a new found complacency, "Nel, who regarded the oppressive neatness of her home with dread, felt comfortable in it with Sula"(29). This happiness ...
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A Dream Deferred. (2006, September 2). Retrieved March 26, 2025, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/A-Dream-Deferred/51756
"A Dream Deferred." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 2 Sep. 2006. Web. 26 Mar. 2025. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/A-Dream-Deferred/51756>
"A Dream Deferred." Essayworld.com. September 2, 2006. Accessed March 26, 2025. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/A-Dream-Deferred/51756.
"A Dream Deferred." Essayworld.com. September 2, 2006. Accessed March 26, 2025. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/A-Dream-Deferred/51756.
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