Dahlia's English Class Blog

“Cry, the Beloved Country” is a novel written by Alan Paton about Stephen Kumalo – a black, Zulu priest who travels to the land of Johannesburg with the desire to reunite with his family members – his son, Absalom, and his sister, Gertrude – whom he’s never heard from in a long time every since they moved to Johannesburg. The novel is also set in a time period where South Africa was governed with racial injustice that heavily impacted the nation’s citizens. Hope and fear is a emotion that is common amongst the character of “Cry, the Beloved Country”. But what function do these common emotions play in the book? How does it influence the characters? And what purpose does influencing those characters do in the novel? Though by definition, fear and hope are contradicting feelings – they act as the same thing in “Cry, the Beloved Country”. And that is being a motivator for the characters. The emotions impacting those characters gives us an idea of the setting/situation the character(s)...

The major effects stereotypes have is that it drastically alters our way of thinking towards a particular group of people (be it a good or a bad thing), conceivably create inequality between groups of people, limits people's opportunities and freedom, and lastly places pressure on people. Some examples of these effects on people, is the inequality between men and women in history. By now, we all should recognize that even in modern society there's inequality between men and women - which is partially established by gender stereotypes. Because of gender stereotypes both gender's opportunities and freedom are constrained, and the two genders are expected to do certain things in a specific manner. Few of these gender stereotypes, is that women are supposedly "submissive and cry a lot" and that men are the "dominant and rarely cries". This obviously isn't the case, as a huge group of people can't be described with unreasonable over-generalized state...