The Black Child as an Aesthetic Protagonist: Educational Reading in Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson"

Abstract

In her short story, "The Lesson" the Black American writer Toni Cade Bambara aesthetically and educationally introduces Sylvia- the black female child as both narrator and protagonist. Bambara does the same technique in most of the short stories included in her collection "Gorilla, My Love". This deliberate action by Bambara raises many of the reader's crucial questions. So this study attempts to investigate the required answers for these questions by means of probing the deep layers of Bambara's short narrative discourse. The aesthetic framework of the research-paper is constructed on answering the following questions: How could we read the character of Sylvia aesthetically? What's about the aesthetics of her central educational role as a major protagonist in comparison with the antagonist, Miss Moore and the other feminist characters? How does the writer instill her social, political, educational and aesthetic notions in the words of her childish narrator and protagonist? Bambara's "The Lesson", as an aesthetic and educational discourse, is committed to change the consciousness of the black people in order to be ready enough to resist all forms of oppression, injustice and inequality of the prevailing mainstream culture of the white community.