I decided to do a close reading for Fanny Fern’s Tyrants of the Shop. The close reading was meant to help me find key themes in, what seems to me, newspaper column to organize my presentation. Fern is essentially writing about women during the late 1860’s and the abuse of common of “[employed] girls.” This writing made it clear that Fern was a feminist, but not a super extreme on that believed all men were “tyrants”, in fact when I was close reading her passage she made it clear we can all be “tyrants” in the shops because of our “brutally” as well as our ignorance or lack of care. Fern also does a good job of victimizing the store girl as well as herself, women shoppers in general, and this is key to understanding her point of view and how she feels when writing this piece.
Seeing as how I am a one trick pony, I am going to relate this to martial arts and specifically Wing Chun. Wing Chun happens to a martial art that was created by a woman, which in itself makes it very unique and most people don’t even know that it was the first style of Kung-Fu Bruce Lee used/practiced. It was created under the assumption that the opponent was male and stronger then the female fighter. The art itself parallels to Fern’s work because both the user and Fern do not have the “man’s strong right arm” but work around that using Wing Chun and writing to project their strengthen .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTa2ImkHsB0
