Summer part 1

In the first part of the book I really got a sense of the town and how Charity felt in her life. One passage says:

"What, she wondered, did North Dormer look like to people from other parts of the world?She herself had lived there since the age of five, and had long supposed it to be a place of some importance....This initiation had shown her that North Dormer was a small place, and developed in her a thirst for information that her position as custodian of the village library had previously failed to excite. For a month or two she dipped feverishly and disconnectedly into the dusty volumes of the Hatchard Memorial Library; then the impression of Nettleton began to fade, and she found it easier to take North Dormer as the norm of the universe than to go on reading."

As I read this passage the image that came to my mind was one of my hometown. I come from a very small town that sounds simiar to the one in the book. Charity talks about how small it is but how at one time she had thought it was an important place. The above passage is a description of her first dose of reality and her first insight into just how big the world is and just how small her town is. I remember when I first starting realizing that Rich Hill ( my town) was not once what I thought it to be when I took my first few trips north to Kansas City. I remember seeing the skyscrapers and wondering why Rich Hill didn't have those. As I grew older I took a great interest in going beyond Rich Hill later in life. Now I am here in college doing what I can to make sure I don't end up in a routine life that I don't enjoy back home, just as it sounds in the story it happened to Charity. She talks about wanting to leave the town someday but stays because she feels sorry for how lonely Lawyer Royall is. She keeps herself there because of him. Now in my comparing this to my hometown I will say that I don'tlook down on anyone who stays in Rich Hill all their lives, it is a great little farm town and a great place to raise a family, but it is just not what is right for me. I have always been one wanting to get out and see the world outside of that tiny town. So I feel a bit of connection with Charity in the fact she too wanted out.


The second passage that I thought about was:

"Charity sank back on her heels and looked at him musingly. She was not in the least afraid of poor Liff Hyatt, though he 'came from the Mountain', and some of the girls ran way when the saw him. Among the more reasonable he passed for a harmless creature a sort of link between the Mountain and civilized folk, who occasionally came down and did a little wood-cutting for a farmer when hands were short."

When I read this I first thought of the character in Sula, the man who made up suicide day. I also thought of how this refelcted on Charity's character. She seemed to undestand this man and understand that she had some sort of connection to him because of their origin. Regardless of Charity's being "from the mountain", I still think that this scene shows that she is a very compassionate person. I think that this event relates to another part of the text where Charity doesn't leave town because she feels sorry for Mr. Royall. She has a heart and tends to put others above herself or at least considers their feelings. Here she talks to Liff as if he were just another person when she describes him as being someone who other girls run away from. This also gives the reader an impression that Charity is different from the other girls and is pretty tough. We see throughout the story that she is very independent and strong. She is not afraid of anything.
She fights some of the cultural narrative that women are passive and weak and scared of everything. The above paragraphs are a sort of example of that and another huge example is when she tells Mr. Royall off, when he tries to get into her room. She is not scared and puts him in his place. I think she is the total opposite of this narrative and there are many examples in the book of this.