The Innerizing Of The Self And The Other

The Innerizing of the Self and the Other

The concept of self is a combination of two individual elements: the inner realization and the outside prospects. Yet most of the time, the inner realization is shaped and formed by outside prospects. The line between the outside and the inside is often erased, and the outside views are absorbed and reformed into a part of the inner mind. People define themselves by the way others define them. In this essay, the process of absorbing outside views into the construction of self will be referred to as "innerizing." The effects of innerizing can be seen in the girl in Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Game", the character Adah in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and the narrator of Brent Staples' "Black Men and Public Space."

The way society and other people look at us play an important role when discussing about the self. Outside appearances are the first characteristics that people notice before they start to know us. In "The Game" by Judith Ortiz Cofer, the humpbacked girl was born imperfect, with a body "curled into a question mark/the eternal why" (9-10). Although the family acted as if the little girl "was the same/as any of [thier] other friends" (22-23), when seeing the little girl standing at the door and waiting to go out and play, the mother still felt awed "by the sight/of one of her God's small mysteries" (27-28). Despite of the views from the outside world, at first the little girl tends to find a comfort zone where she can seek peace within. The little girl would enter a play house "where [they'd] play her favorite game: 'family'" (32) in order to experience a normal person's life. By playing this game, the girl can then discover a kind of love that can not be located under the roof of her family. Her family carefully interacted with her and did not want her to feel awkward and uncomfortable of her appearance. Everything seem to go well on the surface "until it started getting too late/to play pretend" (40-41), as the narrator sadly states. The game she once played is never the same, and the comfort zone she once had is now destroyed and lost forever. The little girl's burden was too heavy for her to carry. After innerizing the outside views, the inner self of the little girl is combined with all the outside prospects, and reformed her concept of self, leading to a sad ending.

This can also be seen in the character Adah in The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Born as a identical twin sister of Leah and with the left side of her body paralyzed from birth, Adah tends to differ herself from Leah not only because of the physical differences, but also because of the way people differ her from her sister. She chooses to remain a silent observer while Leah is more aggressive in certain issues. She volunteers to be the ying to Leah's yang. After establishing a self of her, Adah develops a way to survive in her crooked body and constructs her own viewpoint of the world around her. After a neurologist friend helped her overcome her handicap, she started "losing [her] slant" (Kingsolver 521), and also her self. At first she was "unprepared to accept that [her] whole sense of Adah was founded on a misunderstanding between [her] body and [her] brain," and had to undergo a long period of transition to be "cured." With the disappearance of her physical problems she also loses the ability to read backwards. "Will I lose myself if I lose my limp?"(Kingsolver 524) she questioned. The absence of her crippled problem is innerized and then "healed" all the abnormal functions Adah once bared, including the self she had lived with for all those years. She now has two selfs, "the crooked walker" and "the darling perfection" (636). She is still Adah, but "[she finds she] no longer [has] Ada, the mystery of coming and going" (590). Although some of her previous self has left with her handicap, at the end she learns that "[she] will always be Adah inside," and sums it up saying that "we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes" (595). The injuries