For my English class, I'm supposed to comment on a discussion board about the readings that are assigned.
I read this one piece about a wealthy slave master who falls in love with a white woman and has a chilld with her. Before having the child, he's this tyrant who abuses his slaves, and then after having the kid he starts to loosen up and becomes really happy in general. Then as the child grows up, he notices that he has black features, and disowns his wife, tells her that she's black and it's her fault, and tells her to leave. Later, she notices him burning a bunch of letters, and the narrator says that one of them includes one that he's read before, which was written by his mother to his father, which says that she's happy that her son will never figure out the fact she has mixed-race ancestry.
In the commentary, I wrote that he probably knew about it all along, and the reason he treated his slaves like shit was because of self-hatred and he was venting his frustration onto them, and he only loosened up because he still thought his child was white for a bit, and upon realizing that he wasn't, he blames it on the mother in order to save face since he seems status-conscious. I also questioned whether his love for her at the beginning was genuine, since he's so quick to drop her over something that had nothing to do with her. She even tries to defend herself by saying that she's whiter than him, so maybe he only married her in order to 'cleanse' his bloodline and got mad when she didn't live up to it.
This is probably really basic, but while I was writing a whole paragraph on it I got a kick out of writing it and felt kind of smug for no reason afterwards, like I could write more of these basic interpretations that all end up having the same tone and reflect the same basic outlook. A lot of what I write when asked to do anything interpretive in general seems kind of negative. If I'm writing an essay on current events, it usually goes..everything's just going to shit, here are a bunch of sources to back it up, someone in power should do something about but I'm not sure what and all I can say is something vague and idealistic, or something that's already happening, and that's it. I generally like writing about decline, and events that are disruptive. Is this Ni-HA patting itself on the back or am I an intuitive?