Fear of Humiliation leads to Conformity

A detailed Summary of Fear of Humiliation leads to Conformity

Fear of Humiliation leads to conformity.

Fear of humiliation leads to conformity. People agree with others because they fear ridicule or being isolated from the crowd. They fear the idea of not being a part of the whole. They fear isolation or worse, being ostracized by the group. Most people usually have an innate desire to fit in with a group. Consequently, they follow others not because they comply with what the majority is doing, but because they want to be a part of the powerful majority; not the weaker minority. Still those that resolve not to conform still have to deal with the conflict of going against the majority.

Examples of this idea are in the short stories, "My Man Bovanne" by Toni Bambara; "Salvation" by Langston Hughes; and "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro.

"In My Man Bovanne," Toni Bambara recounts a story of how a woman, Hazel, overcomes the humiliation that people try to force on her. She resists the congruity of her community by dancing with and showing a blind man, Bovanne, a good time. The people in her community have conformed to the idea that the blind man is a vagrant. They once held Bovanne in high regard, but when he became blind, instead of them taking care of him they just started to igno

re him. Thus, the people labeled her as an outcast because she chose to take care of him. Hazel does not worry about conformity and believes that people should just be themselves. In her eyes, the blind man is the same as he was before he became blind. Her family and the people in the community did not approve of her relationship with Bovanne. They jumped to conclusions and resolved that she had an underlying reason to care for him, other than just camaraderie. When challenged by her family she stands up for Bovanne, which shows courage on her part. It is one thing to just disregard humiliation and not conform, but to be affronted and still stand up for what she believed showed strength.

The story Boys and Girls shows a different side of people conforming. Alice Munro tells a story of how people once appreciated that she worked around the farm with her father because she was older than her brother. Later, as she and her brother grew older that approval begins to change. People stopped regarding her as her father's helper, and more as a girl that gets in the way. This conformity comes from society's standards not from any inner shame, as in the previous stories. Instead of her family being proud that she was helping them, all they could do was anticipate when her brother, Laird, would be capable of working. The girl in the story at first tried to overlook what was beginning to happen around her. When her grandmother would scold her remarking how girls should behave, Alice confirmed that she still slammed the doors, and sat awkwardly reasoning that this kept her free. Like Hazel, she too, tries not to conform and just to be herself. Then in the end, she can no longer fight the desire to conform. In the end, when she sets the horse free, instead of her father scolding her as he normally would he just says 'She's only a girl.' (pg. 993, Munro)

In the story Salvation by Langston Hughes, Langston fears that everyone will think that he is the only person who has not seen Jesus. He conforms to everyone's expectations and then lets himself down by lying. The variance in Langston and Hazel's situation was that Hazel did not conform because she knew that there was nothing

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Approximate Word count = 1484
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English