Women and the City Literature

In West’s The Day of the Locust the city of Los Angeles is an alluring Black Widow with a deadly bite behind its glitter and glitz. Strange, disparate people populate this novel like the painter Tod who wants to paint “The Burning of Los Angeles” (West 2). Women, too, play a critical role in Locust, but they are as deadly as the city can be to the men who are lured by their particular brand of glitter and glitz. Creatures like Faye are represented as a brand of female that will bring down any man naïve enough to get too close – emotionally and physically. As Tod muses at the end of chapter one, “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the tru

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Kendry knows she is trapped if she does not lie about who she really is in such a racist environment. In this story the city is not portrayed as something that is all good or all bad. It is portrayed as having good and bad qualities but only those who are validated by mainstream society and cultural institutions have a shot at the good stuff. Clare knows she will remain poor with limited opportunities if she does not pass herself off as white. In this book there is a valid attempt made to portray the obstacles women face in the “city” but also to show the added burdens being a minority adds to the equation. So, too, we see that women can be enemies and not helpers of each other in the way Clare makes a move for her best friend’s husband. As Irene laments regarding having to suffer as a female and as a minority, “It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well” (Larson 225). Women are not represented as helpless victims in this novella, but they are portrayed as sufferers typically at the expense of men of black and white culture. Still, the ability that many have to be able to overcome such obstacles does not come without hard work
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Clare Kendry, Addie Jefferson, LA Riots, Hammetts Thin, Doctor Peabodys, City INTRODUCTION, Creatures Faye, Larsons Passing, Nick Yes, Angeles West, american fiction, main female, lay dying, day locust, los angeles, modern american fiction, culture values, modern american, main female character, female character, wests day, truly monstrous, faulkners lay dying, wests day locust, burning los angeles,
Approximate Word count = 1236
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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