Single Stories

Summer Community Read Questions

1. In discussing a single story, Adichie is expressing the idea that the stories being taught to people are not always the only correct ideas. Single Stories only show topics in a single light and give the storyteller the power to stereotype vast groups of people. According to Adichie, a single story is a story that is told in such a way that excludes another truthful viewpoint about the subject at hand and subsequently sways the readers or listeners perspective. She says, while talking about her house boy’s family Fide in Nigeria, “All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.” In other
In the novel The Hours by Michael Cunninghan, the three mirroring narratives of Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughan all have single stories buried within their daily lives. An overlying single story in all three points of view(perspective0 comes from having to live life within the constraints of how others believe life should be lived. In Virginia Woolf’s perspective, an example of this is when she expresses this belief in her ideas for her novel Mrs. Dalloway. As she is brainstorming about her book, she concludes that “Clarissa Dalloway, in her first youth, will love another girl, Virginia thinks; Clarissa will believe that a rich, riotous future is opening before her, but eventually… she will come to her senses, as young women do, and marry a suitable man” (Cunningham 81-82). In other words, Woolf believes that women should have to conform to what society wants and marry not a woman, but a man. This gives a false idea to women that they must marry a man. Obviously, this is a single story as it is perfectly fine for women to be with whomever they please, but it is shown through Woolf’s point of view that it is not. When people read the above sentences, it makes them feel as if they too are not allowed to be with someone of the same sex, which ties gender into this issue. Furthermore, in a more general sense, single stories can cause homosexuals to feel ostracized from society, which can cause people to mask their real feelings and
One of the protagonists, Clarissa Vaughan, challenges single stories surrounding the idea that sexuality is not actually explicit and set, but fluid. Clarissa reveals this to the readers that aside from having the love of her life, Sally, who lives with Clarissa, she had a fling with her friend at the time Richard. After reminiscing about her time with Richard, Clarissa says, “Why not have sex with everybody, as long as you wanted them and they wanted you” (Cunningham 96). At the time, it was a single story in society that people should be defined as gay or straight, but Clarissa was said that no matter what gender the people may be, they should be able to do what they wanted to. She is threatening the single story because she is totally undefined, as a woman who goes with whomever she wants to, and she believes that everyone should do that as well. So, the popular idea that people’s sexualities should be put into two simple, unchanging categories, was tested by Clarissa with her want for free