Talk:Women in literature

M. Saunders Sarah Outterson Women in Literature The Blank Page vs. Letter from Birmingham Jail April 11, 2008

After reading Isak Dinesen’s “The Blank Page”, I was more profoundly impacted by her grandmother’s statement: “Who then…tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does.” about telling stories, rather than the rest of the author’s story. She further defines exactly what she means by saying: “And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page…”

Though Dinesen’s grandmother is speaking about the blank page as a platform for books of stories, it made me think about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. The highly popular letter was written by Dr. King after he was arrested for civil disobedience on April 16, 1963. But he wrote a good portion of it within the margins of newspapers because he initially wasn’t allowed to have a note book or sheets of clean paper. Letters also tell very compelling stories as well as respond to any given issue or incident. Dr. King wrote the letter as a rebuttal to fellow clergy who had criticized King for his civil rights works. As in Dinesen’s “The Blank Page”, I was struck by King’s prediction about the future of Christianity. “Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists. It seems that he is warning of how disconnected people will become from church due to the flaws of humanity. “If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust,” he writes. What he said then saying seems to have come true especially in the post Catholic church pedophile scandals over the years.

Dinesen’s grandmother says in part: “When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration has written down its tale…” King was inspired to write such thoughts in a letter. Without question, the topic alone could fill the pages of a book. He is a different type of storyteller than Isak Dinesen, but they both arrive at the same conclusion: All words lead to unique and individual thought processes that may or may not be told as a story. Q: What does Dinesen’s grandmother mean when she says: “Be loyal to the story…Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story”?