This essay examines the concept of "otherness" — the condition of supreme non-belonging — as a recurring theme in literature and personal experience. Drawing on Langston Hughes's "Cora Unashamed," Deborah Tannen's essays on gender marking, George Orwell's reflections on complexity, and the framing metaphor of Merchant-Ivory films, the paper argues that otherness is not merely a social burden but a necessary precondition for self-realization and historical significance. The author connects literary examples to personal and national experiences, including a student's mixed ethnic identity and the collective American disorientation following the September 11 attacks. Ultimately, the essay contends that embracing otherness — rather than suppressing it — is central to individualism, progress, and the American spirit.
The essay demonstrates thematic synthesis: rather than treating each text separately, the author identifies a single unifying idea (otherness) and moves across multiple sources — fiction, essay, autobiography, and personal reflection — to build a cumulative argument. This technique shows readers how to write comparatively across a reading list rather than summarizing texts one at a time.
The paper opens with a framing anecdote (Merchant-Ivory films / Shakespeare-Wala) to introduce the painted bird concept, then applies it to Langston Hughes's Cora as the central literary case study. It broadens outward to Tannen's theory of social marking, incorporates a peer student's personal narrative for contrast, and finally reaches the most personal and contemporary register — the author's own post-9/11 reflections. The conclusion ties these layers back to a philosophical claim about American individualism and the value of non-belonging.
Merchant-Ivory films are varied in their settings and styles, but one theme pervades most of them: otherness. In Shakespeare-Wallah, for instance, a troupe of British actors — most born and raised in India — perform Shakespeare plays for the Maharajas and their families before India's independence in 1947. The British actors' entire existence was in India, and many of them had never even been to their "native" England. When Indian independence arrived in 1947, the maharajas were ousted and their families lost their power and wealth. As a result, the actors had no one to play to — funds were scarce for art and theater — and they possessed no other marketable skills in India.
They contemplated a return to England, but the return would not be a return at all. England would be as foreign to them as Germany; all they knew was India. And without a role in India, India was not their home either, as they were white and British, and their kind had just been ousted as India's colonial power. This troupe of actors personified the concept of the "painted bird" — the other in literature.
The narratives we have encountered this semester have dealt extensively with this concept of the other, or the painted bird. Each of the protagonists, in fact, represents the painted bird in his or her own way: not belonging, at first, in his or her immediate surroundings, but soon we as readers realize that the protagonist does not belong anywhere at all.
That is the nature of otherness: supreme non-belonging. Otherness can be caused by circumstances, personality, or a combination of both. At first, it seems natural to want to limit otherness, but upon closer examination of the phenomenon — the feeling of otherness — we realize that to limit it would suppress that which is great in the human spirit. Indeed, otherness is key and integral to the notion of the American spirit.
Cora in Langston Hughes's short story "Cora Unashamed" is the perfect example of the "other," or the painted bird:
Cora was the oldest of a family of eight children — the Jenkins niggers. The only Negroes in Melton, thank God! Where they came from originally — that is, the old folks — God knows. The kids were born there. The old folks are still there now. Pa drives a junk wagon. The old woman ails around the house, ails and quarrels. Seven kids are gone. Only Cora remains. Cora simply couldn't go, with nobody else to help take care of Ma. And before that she couldn't go, with nobody to see that her brothers and sisters got through school (she the oldest, and Ma ailing). And before that — well, somebody had to help Ma look after one baby behind another that kept on coming. (Hughes 1)
Not only is Cora a woman and an African-American in a country with a long history of enslaving and discriminating against African-Americans and women, she lives in a town with no other African-Americans. She does not belong in that town, she does not belong in the Studevant family, and she does not really belong at home either, since she is there with Ma and Pa only by default, as the passage above makes clear.
She finally finds a place where she belongs — with Jessie. But even Jessie is taken away from her in the end, and that is when Cora finally realizes she is "the other":
Cora got up from her seat by the dining room door. She said, "Honey, I want to say something." She spoke as if she were addressing Jessie. She approached the coffin and held out her brown hands over the white girl's body. Her face moved in agitation. "They killed you! And for nothin'... They killed your child... They took you away from here in the springtime of your life and now you're gone, gone, gone!... They preaches you a pretty sermon and they don't say nothin'. The sings you a song, and they don't say nothin'. But Cora's here, she's gone tell 'em what they done to you. She's gonna tell 'em why they took you to Kansas City." (Hughes 9)
Here, in realizing her otherness — in finally stepping up to say her piece — Cora comes into her own and finally belongs. She exhibits a theme that has grown ever clearer over the course of this semester: otherness is a necessary step on the path to enlightenment, belonging, and possession of one's own existence.
Cora steps into the arena in which she is least welcome — in which she is most "the other" — and takes the otherness bull by the horns, emerging a free woman who belongs.
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