Answer The Following Questions: What Is The Central Problem ✓ Solved

Answer the following questions: What is the central problem

Answer the following questions: What is the central problem Paul Lawrence Dunbar is identifying in his poetry? What does he mean when he says, "we wear the mask"? Why would someone want to wear a mask? How does this problem of masking relate to the problem he identifies in "Sympathy"? What is the central problem Alice Dunbar-Nelson is identifying in her short story? Why would Victor choose the path he chooses? And what are the results? How does Victor's problem relate to the ones that Paul Laurence Dunbar considers?

Paper For Above Instructions

Introduction

This paper examines central problems identified by Paul Laurence Dunbar in his poems "We Wear the Mask" and "Sympathy," and connects those problems to themes in a short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson featuring the character Victor. The analysis focuses on how Dunbar represents the psychological and social burden of enforced concealment and how Alice Dunbar-Nelson dramatizes choices made under racial, gendered, and socioeconomic constraint. Comparisons highlight continuity between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black literary responses to oppression and the strategies individuals use to survive and navigate hostile social worlds (Dunbar, 1896; Dunbar, 1899; Du Bois, 1903).

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Central Problem in His Poetry

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s central problem, as voiced across his poems, is the experience of constrained interiority under white supremacy: the tension between private suffering and public performance. Dunbar regularly depicts Black subjectivity as fractured by social demands to appear cheerful, submissive, or harmless while enduring humiliation, violence, and grief. This structural conflict—between inner truth and outer display—is a cultural and psychological burden produced by systemic racism (Dunbar, 1896; Gates, 1988).

"We Wear the Mask": Meaning and Motives

When Dunbar writes "We wear the mask," he names an enforced concealment of true feeling. The “mask” stands for a practiced exterior—smiles, jokes, silence, accommodation—that hides pain, anger, and resistance. The line compresses both a survival strategy and a moral injury: wearing the mask protects the wearer from immediate harm (economic retribution, physical violence, social exclusion) while exacting psychological costs—alienation, emotional compression, and loss of authentic self (Dunbar, 1896; Poetry Foundation).

People adopt the mask for several reasons: physical safety in a violently racist society; economic survival in segregated labor markets; social acceptance in spaces where dissent is perilous; and as a tactic of strategic accommodation, allowing limited advancement or the protection of loved ones. Masking can function as agency—pragmatic adaptation to oppressive conditions—but it also reproduces structures of subordination by normalizing silence and erasing visible protest (Du Bois, 1903; Gates, 1988).

Relation to "Sympathy": The Caged Interior

"Sympathy" develops an allied image: the caged bird that beats its wings against the boundaries that deny flight. Dunbar’s speaker in "Sympathy" describes physical and emotional confinement, yearning, and recurring pain that is hidden from the outside observer (Dunbar, 1899). Both poems locate the problem in environments that force the Black subject to internalize and contain suffering. While "We Wear the Mask" emphasizes performative concealment, "Sympathy" emphasizes frustrated longing and repetitive trauma. Together they map a continuum: the mask hides the caged bird’s song; the bird’s song is both a testimony and a cry that the mask suppresses (Dunbar, 1896; 1899).

Alice Dunbar-Nelson: Central Problem in Her Short Fiction

Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s short fiction frequently explores constraints at the intersections of race, gender, and class—how social expectations, respectability politics, and intimate power dynamics shape personal choices and identity. In the story referenced here, the central problem revolves around the limited set of socially sanctioned paths available to Black people and women specifically, and how those limits force morally fraught choices (Dunbar-Nelson, collected stories; Harris, 1990). The protagonist Victor embodies the dilemmas faced by an individual who must decide between accommodation, self-preservation, or resistance within a world that penalizes authenticity.

Why Victor Chooses His Path and the Results

Victor’s choice—interpreted here as a turn toward accommodation or a strategy of assimilation/passing or pragmatic compliance—is driven by recognitions common to Dunbar and Dunbar-Nelson’s worlds: immediate threats to livelihood or life, desire for social mobility or familial protection, and internalized expectations about acceptable Black behavior. Such choices yield mixed results: short-term safety or material gain may come at the cost of psychological distress, isolation, fractured identity, and moral compromise. Alternatively, attempted resistance may bring dignity but immediate harm. Dunbar-Nelson often dramatizes both outcomes to show that constrained agency under oppressive systems produces tragic trade-offs rather than simple moral verdicts (Dunbar-Nelson; Harris, 1990).

How Victor’s Problem Relates to Dunbar’s Themes

The link between Victor’s dilemma and Dunbar’s poems is structural. Victor’s decision to "wear a mask" (metaphorically) or to pursue accommodation mirrors Dunbar’s depiction of performative survival: both texts show individuals compelled to hide or alter their inner lives to navigate a hostile social order. The emotional consequences—alienation, longing, incremental self-erasure—match the suffering of the caged bird and the masked speaker. Thus, Dunbar’s lyric idiom and Dunbar-Nelson’s narrative dramatize the same social pathology: systems that constrain self-expression and coerce performative identities as condition of survival (Du Bois, 1903; Gates, 1988).

Comparative Conclusion

Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Dunbar-Nelson diagnose the same historical mechanism from complementary perspectives. Dunbar’s lyric voice captures immediate interior effects of racial constraint—masking and caged longing—while Dunbar-Nelson’s fiction traces the temporal consequences of choices made under constraint, including how accommodation reproduces constraint across relationships and generations. Reading them together clarifies how performance, silence, and compromise operate both as tactics of survival and as sources of psychological injury. By linking the lyric image of the mask and the caged bird to narrative choices such as Victor’s, readers can see how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black writers rendered the costs and strategies of living under systemic oppression (Dunbar, 1896; 1899; Dunbar-Nelson; Du Bois, 1903).

Final Remarks

Understanding these works in conversation foregrounds the interplay of agency and constraint: masks are often adaptive, not merely self-betrayal; yet their ubiquity signals the depth of structural injustice. Dunbar’s poetics and Dunbar-Nelson’s narratives invite empathy for the complex moral economies that shape choices like Victor’s, and they call readers to recognize that the social systems forcing concealment and cage-like confinement are the real subjects of critique (Poetry Foundation; Britannica).

References

• Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "We Wear the Mask." Lyrics of Lowly Life, 1896. (Poem)
• Dunbar, Paul Laurence. "Sympathy." The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. (Poem)
• Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. Collected Stories of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. (Short fiction; various editions)
• Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903. (On double consciousness)
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, 1988. (Theory of Black expressive strategies)
• Poetry Foundation. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: 'We Wear the Mask'." Poetry Foundation website. (poetryfoundation.org)
• Poetry Foundation. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: 'Sympathy'." Poetry Foundation website. (poetryfoundation.org)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Paul Laurence Dunbar." Britannica.com. (Biographical and historical overview)
• Harris, Trudier. "Alice Dunbar-Nelson." In African American Writers: A Critical Companion. (Scholarly analysis of Dunbar-Nelson's themes)
• Smith, Valerie. "Representing Blackness: Issues of Voice and Identity in African American Literature." Journal articles and anthologies on masking and representation. (Selected scholarship)