The oldest found mask is from 7000 BC, and experts believe it was used for rituals and ceremonies. Masks have an important cultural context in history, and as the use of masks has progressed, humans have adopted masks into other forms of entertainment and festivities. In present times, with better understanding of human psychology, society has come to understand that people wear emotional “masks” as well. Masks have a somewhat important context in both Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”. Both works describe masks as a way to hide one’s true self from everyone; Dunbar, however, depicts masks as an emotional barrier to cover up one’s true emotions or feelings, while Golding uses masks as a physical object to hide behind. …show more content…
In movies such as The Purge, the masks give off a chilling presence. This kind of behaviour has been observed in Native American tribes as well. They would use war paint to intimidate enemies, as well as show rank and different traits they demonstrated in battle. Red was known to symbolize strength or success. In Lord of the Flies, masks are used to separate Jack’s group from Ralph’s group. When Jack appears at Ralph’s camp, he is naked except for a belt. Usually, one would be embarrassed or ashamed to be dressed like that in front of a crowd, but he was “safe from the shame or self-consciousness behind the mask of his paint and could look at each of them in turn”(Golding 140). This passage demonstrates the empowerment that can come from having one’s face hidden. Jack and the hunters used their “war paint” to scare or intimidate Ralph’s group as well. When the hunters did raid Ralph’s camp, they were depicted as “demoniac figures” (Golding 140) which exudes a chilling undertone. This scared the littluns as well, so they “fled screaming” (Golding 140). Both the diction of this passage and the reaction of the littluns demonstrate the sometimes frightening nature of masks. Overall, along with other movies or books, the use of paint in Jack’s tribe and the reaction it evoked brings forth the idea of masks being used in an intimidating
“...the mask was a thing on its own behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.” (Golding, 66). The mask provides him many things, like shamelessness and liberation from self consciousness. Most notably, the mask provides Jack with a gateway to his new blood lust. He kills a pig for the blood, and with it, gets rid of his civilized nature.
Such personification mirrors Dunbar’s use of figurative language, which relates the poems in more ways than one. Dunbar touches on human features such as cheeks and eyes in his poem but also uses a spiritual element to advance his point of view. Furthermore, “We Wear the Mask” was written in 1896; a period in American history that was post-slavery but still had widespread discrimination. The spiritual connotation within Dunbar’s poem can allude to African American churches and/or the hymns slaves sung on plantations. Nevertheless, the struggle of African Americans is a symbol of both presented
’’(63 ) War Paint The war paint represents violence. When he “planned his new face”, it suggests that Jack is more powerful as ever, the paint covers his face expressions allowing him to hunt freely similar to the Lucha Libre
In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears.
He utilizes the mask when he says that “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford…” (Fitzgerald ##). He wants everyone including Nick Carraway, the narrator, to know that he is a valuable and worthy person. However, it backfires when Nick Carraway says “I knew why
According to According to Laurie Hutzler it is “The character’s Mask is the false face (or false self) the character wears or projects in public” (Hutzler). My characters mask is being shy and avoiding others.
In the poem, “We Wear the Mask” , the author wants the reader to appreciate the beauty of the piece. It’s a beautiful poem that describes how people go through a lot. They are hurt and broken but will still act like they are ok. It also shows that it’s not just one person going through these struggles, It’s a lot of people that go through this same stuff. The author uses rhyming, repetition, religious words, we/our statements, and words of pain to portray this rhetorical purpose.
After getting into an argument with Ralph, Jack decides to split up and forms his own group. He was chief and sat, “naked to the waist, his face blocked out in white and red. The newly beaten and untied Wilfred was sniffling noisily in the background” (Golding 160). Due to the face paint, Jack now has the authority to beat Wilfred without anyone questioning his reasoning. The face paint makes it impossible for anyone to read Jack’s feelings because it “blocks” out his facial expressions.
About the mask the person that wear the mask to hide their identity from the rest of the village. According to umunna.org “The mask is also worn to resemble the spirit of a dead community member. By wearing the mask, a masquerader is designed to be beautiful, intimidating, or downright sinister some to say it has spiritual powers that are conducted through the
Masks hide the truth and obscure the facts. They form a barrier between what is real and what is an illusion. Yet, during from the moment blacks were brought to this continent in chains, to the moment they were granted civil rights in the 1960’s, masks were a method of survival. Another way of life for African Americans was the practice of signifying. Signifying is mostly seen in the black literary tradition as a means for African Americans to take back power from the white through misinformation and deception.
The mask is the hard shell that young men are expected to face the world with. They are expected to show only their best selves and hide their insecurities and worries. The mask is incredibly relatable to the social construction of gender, because it was created through the social construction of gender. Young males would not need to create a mask and live behind it if society didn 't force them too.
In the book the Lord of the Flies the masks that Jack’s group uses helps them overcome their fear of killing the pig by hiding their true feelings. When Jack volunteers himself as the leader of hunting he doesn’t realize that he would have to overcome new challenges. Masculinity “masks” and the clay masks they wear in the Lord of the Flies are basically just “things trying to look like something else” (Golding 63). Jack explains to his group of hunters that the masks they were going to wear are so they can look like something they are not or to hide what is keeping them from killing a pig. This shows that they are trying to push away their true selves and by looking like something else they can make a character of who they choose to be based on the reason they put the “mask” on.
The veil that the minister wears in "The Ministers Black Veil", by Nathanial Hawthorne represents both the minister’s isolation from society and also his connection to society through sin. This symbolism of the veil is no immediately obvious, but later on throughout the story becomes noticeable. In the story when the minister, Mr. Hooper first walks out of his house wearing the black veil, everyone was startled. No one quite understood why the minister would be wearing this veil for no specific reason.
It is, obviously, a symbolic one, that is meant to hide the suffering of people. It hides everything, “our cheeks and […] our eyes”, and “the eyes [being] the mirror of the soul”, the mask hides the inner you. (Dunbar, l. 2) (Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra). But, in addition to the hiding, there’s also the lie about the emotion. Indeed, the mask isn’t only meant to hide the emotions, but also to create new ones on the surface, as we can see when the author said “We wear the mask that […] lies” (Dunbar, l. 1).
This mask represents the multi-identity of Jack, one side being a fierce, hunter hiding behind the mask, and the other being a scared, young boy. The mask depicts Jack ready for a hunt on one half and a fearful, mentally