Essay Questions

The importance of education is one of the major controlling themes of the novel. What traumatic event chillingly illustrates the difference between ignorance and knowledge?

Childless Aunt Sissy is pregnant again. This make her eleventh which means the previous ten ended tragically. In fact, all ten pregnancies ended the same way, with the baby stillborn. Sissy shocks the family by announcing this time around she is going to see a Jewish doctor rather than a Christian doctor, but sure enough, the newly delivered infant is blue when she dares to look at it. And then Sissy hears a word that is new to her; a word which she had apparently never heard spoke during the previous ten tragic trips to the delivery room: oxygen. What she witnesses next is nothing less than miracle to her: her eleventh lifeless baby being resurrected from the dead, filled with life and doing something none of previous ten had ever done. The baby started breathing. Sissy is overcome by this astonishing turn of events, desperately asking the doctor if the baby is really alive, terrified it is not. The doctor’s response says everything about the tragic consequences to be found in the chasm between ignorance and knowledge: “What else?” as he shrugs his shoulders at what is to him just another day at the office.

What evidence suggests that denial is a fundamental necessity for surviving poverty-stricken tenement life?

The very first scene reveals this tendency when Francie decides to describe Brooklyn as serene even though she prefers the word somber. After Francie is attacked by the child molester, an intern shows up to care for her. When he is giving her a sedative, he advises her parents to tell her it was just a bad dream when she wakes up. They do as instructed and eventually it does come to seem like a dream whenever she thinks back to it. When Katie discovers that the official death certificate is going to say that the cause of Johnny’s death is pneumonia and alcoholism, she pressures him to write down just pneumonia and leave the alcoholism off because, after all, he’s dead and what does it matter. She makes this request in order to be able to tell her kids that Johnny just died from pneumonia as if they hadn’t watched their father get drunk nearly every day of their lives. This desire to rewrite the truth through denial is passed down to Francie and her discovery of it is a major turning point when she decides to burn all her optimistic and upbeat writing assignments which earned her good grades and while keeping the more honest papers which received lower grades.

What traumatic incident does Francie witness which causes her to write in her diary that “As long as I live, I will never have a woman for a friend. I will never trust any woman again” except for her family?

This emotional outburst of a sudden deeply ingrained bias against women is stimulated by one of the most appalling scenes in the entire novel. On a typical Saturday afternoon, Francie see the pretty young unmarried single mother, Joanna, walking on the sidewalk, prompting her to wonder why she has been pointed out as lesson to learn from. Joanna smiles at Francie, but though she wants to return the smile, she doesn’t. She then watches as the gossipy tension between a few of the housewives from the neighborhood and Joanna turns into a confrontation which quickly escalates form recriminations to name calling to a violent drama straight out of the Bible as the housewives actually begin stoning Joanna, guiltily stopping only when one of the rocks strikes Joanna’s baby. The lesson Francie draws from is a simple one: the only common interest bonding women together is their desire to “trample on some other woman.”