Short Girl, Short Stories

In Baldwin’s “The Man Child”, Jamie presents himself as a very complex and, particularly following the ending, confusing character. He’s a bit of a brooding, mysterious type, but we learn a lot from his interaction with Eric and his fight with Eric’s father. There are many reasons and years of trouble behind Jamie murdering Eric, but I believe that the one main issue tying this whole mess together is gender roles and patriarchy. The event that started everything leading up to Eric’s death is Jamie’s wife. Jamie tries to shrug his wife leaving him off and act like he doesn’t care, but following her leaving, he very much deteriorates. He stops caring for his land, which has to be sold off, and winds up relying on Eric’s family for caretaking, becoming dependent on them as if he was their child (hence the title). There’s no way he wasn’t affected by being abandoned. In defending the idea that Jamie never actually cared for his wife, he references many of the stereotypical “wife” thin...

In class, we talked a lot about what Esmé means to the narrator and why he finds her to be such a comfort. Personally, I believe that Esmé represents a break from the chaos going on around him. Right now, about to go off to war, everything is uncertain, terrifying, and real. Stumbling upon the children’s choir provided the narrator with a small haven of innocence and purity when the world around him is everything but. It’s very important to note that the practice the narrator witnesses is a practice instead of an actual performance, and Esmé, who he focuses on, is tired and over the whole rehearsal instead of enlightened and perfectly pure. Normally we associate the beauty of children’s choirs with the beauty of the special connection they seem to have with higher beings when they sing, as well as the fact that they’re all too young to be developing issues and negativity. The fact that the narrator finds the imperfection to be the best thing about the choir shows that there’s a d...