bell hook's "Memories of My Girlhood" Revised

    Bell hook's "Memories of My Girlhood" offers readers a glimpse her of thoughts on "Girlhood" through the lens of her own experience. hooks introduction notes the ideas and expectations of young girls to like things because they are perfect and most importantly, seemingly better than them. Young girls enjoyed dressing their Barbies up and living vicariously through Barbies glamorous, yet imaginary lifestyle. "Barbie is anything but real, which is why we like her" hook states. In contrast her second paragraph is about her liking of a brown baby doll in which the reader can note that this doll is a different color and size of the barbie. Hooks speaks of her mother in the narrative and quotes "She tells us that I, her problem child, decided out of nowhere that I did not want a White doll to play with. I demanded a brown doll, one that would look like me." She uses the word "problem child" to highlight this decision hooks has made at a young age to not conform to social norms. She notes that the baby doll looked real, so close to a real baby her mother would mistake it for one. This realness to me is pointing to the fact that hooks has found comfort and joy in ordinary things rather than unrealistic ones. "Barbie" for hook's was not enough of a comfort and she needed something real and closer to her own experience. Hooks was unable to relate to Barbie and at a young age could clearly identify the difference between illusion and reality. Hook's work may be just about baby dolls on the surface but she is spotlighting a much larger issue.

      As an American society we grow up relying on many unrealistic comforts such as media, movies, magazines and many more. If you asked an average person if they would prefer to watch a new, mainstream, unrealistic comedy about something that will never happen to them or read a true story on a worldly event, you more often than not could guess what the response would be. We fall victim to this behavior because it is part of our society and our culture. In these works we find an escape and an outlet from our mundane, 9-5 lives.We are told that we as Americans can live out the "American dream" and be rich and famous too if we "work hard" but this "dream" is too, unrealistic. We have become much more interested in the success in lives of others than our own. Actors in the movies and TV shows have events happening to them and we root for them and not ourselves anymore. A book or TV show about our 9-5 lives would never be interesting enough to film or write about and so we give into other people's. It would not be a strong enough illusion to distract us from our daily lives enough. Viewers and readers of all of the classes enjoy being entertained and our society needs this comfort, unrealistic or not it has and will continue to thrive throughout generations.


.