The Damaging of Thumos. In Dorothy Allisons Two or Three Things I Know for Sure and Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature she explores the effects of being generalized at a young age and how it affected her identity and self worthiness through he

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The Damaging of Thumos

        In Dorothy Allisons Two or Three Things I Know for Sure and Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature she explores the effects of being generalized at a young age and how it affected her identity and self worthiness through her life. In Jonathon Shay’s Odysseus in America, Shay uses similar concepts throughout his book that can be used to further explain Allison’s experiences. Through Shay’s work, one can conclude that through the experiences Allison experienced her thumos was damaged at a young age, which is why she had to struggle for so many years to restore it. This then leads to the question of how can ones thumos become damaged?

        Allison open ups Skin with the essay, “A Question of Class” in which she states, “We were the they everyone talks about—the ungrateful poor” (p.13). In the beginning paragraphs of this essay she explores the experience she had as a young child having to grow up poor in Greenville, South Caroline. It becomes apparent the harsh not only criticisms, but generalizations she got for being poor and how it had a strong effect on the way people treated her. As always being referred to as they, Allison at a young age questioned who she was and why this notion of they had her feeling “the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was….” (p.13, Skin).  She goes on to say how she did not want to be they anymore and how by being generalized to a certain group would lead her to never having the chance to “name her own life, understand it, or claim it” (p.13, Skin).

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        While people outside of her social class generalized her, the people within her social class as well as her family, made her eternalize these generalizations. Her family on a regular basis would call each other ugly. She explained this by saying, “We were not beautiful. We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly.”(p.37, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure). Allison began to eternalize everything she was told about herself. She believed she was ugly, she believed that she deserved ...

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