William Blake's “Little Black Boy,” Christina Rossetti's “Goblin Market,” James Joyce's “The Dead,” and Sarah Kane's Blasted each demonstrate how the use of language by a writer can give us intimate access to the period which, in turn, influences the writer's choices. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an Original Essay Coming out of a period when writers were creating anti-slavery literature, Blake's "Little Black Boy" goes beyond a critique of physical violence to examine the subtle ways in which people normalize racist attitudes. A child's malleable mind provides the ideal breeding ground for these attitudes. In the poem, the boy's mother explains his skin color by telling him "and we are given a little space on earth/ so that we can learn to bear these rays of love." / and these black bodies and this sunburned face / is but a cloud and like a shady grove” (Blake 14-16). The narrator uses references to the sun and clouds to naturalize racial differences. The word choices – “learn,” “rays of love,” “a little space” – take on the patient, instructive tone of a mother teaching her child a lesson in a form that is both simple and comforting. . The narrator demonstrates how language is deployed not only to promote but also to internalize oppression. Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” uses lilting, beautiful language to buffer the provocative content. Although stylistically the poem adheres to Victorian literary conventions, it radically challenges cultural conventions. The poem uses the genre of the fairy tale to image a woman-centered utopia. At a time when women actually had to negotiate their lifestyle through men, Rossetti demonstrates the power of language to bring social critique into the mainstream. The sisters in the poem resist patriarchal culture through their intense intimacy that makes marriage unnecessary, an intimacy demonstrated in lines such as "head of gold by head of gold, like two pigeons in a nest, folded in the wings l 'from each other, they lie down in their curtained bed' (Rossetti 84-88). The pigeon metaphor naturalizes what might be characterized as a "deviant" act, thereby reducing the likelihood that the casual reader will interpret the relationship between the women as incestuous or homosexual. Lines like “cheek to cheek and breast to breast, locked together in one nest,” coupled with nature imagery, lend a purity and innocence to their interactions. The pleasant, rhythmic language, ornate imagery, and repetition resemble those of a bedtime story, lulling the reader into the poem. In this way, Rossetti "sanitizes" the eroticism of the poem so that readers do not see these acts as dirty and shameful but rather as something beautiful to embrace. “Goblin Market” uses fey language to detach acts of love from the stigma associated with labels such as “homosexual” and “incestuous,” labels on which the hegemony relies to assert its authority. During the modernist period, the "culture wars" in England revolved around the books taught in schools and favored the use of "proper English" rather than the type of English spoken by working-class people. In “The Dead”, the characters embrace this homogenization of language by carefully modulating their words in order to meet certain social expectations. By centering the story on Gabriel's extreme self-consciousness regarding his verbal statements, Joyce reveals.