Lamia, By John Keatsby

“‘I don’t like strawberries,’ Eddie said on one occasion.” Why should he like strawberries, because his father does? Why should a beautiful serpent go through a painful transformation, because she can receive love? Keats’s “Lamia” and Rhys “The Days They Burned the Books” all come back to one point, the pressure to conform to society. It seems the only outcome is to accept it, to make society happy, but is that really true, can somebody be happy if they’re not themselves, in the truest form. Giving into the “temptation”, to conform to society means losing your identity and essentially losing your value in the world.
In Keats’s “Lamia”, Lamia faces the pressure to conform to society, changing from a serpent to a woman. Lamia, a beautiful
The struggle of trying to decide who to choose, his mother or his father, English vs. Caribbean. Mr. Sawyer and Mrs. Sawyer are married and live in the Caribbean island with their son, Eddie. The narrator tells the story of how differences that Eddie faces, for example, “‘I don’t like strawberries,’ Eddie said on one occasion.’ ‘You don’t like strawberries?’ ‘No, and I don’t like daffodils either. Dad’s always going on and on about them. He says they lick the flowers here into a cocked hat and I bet that’s a lie’” (Rhys, 2594). In this instance, Eddie does not to choose to conform to his father, Mr. Sawyer, by not liking strawberries or daffodils, seeing how they represent the English. Choosing to like these two characteristics causes Eddie to fully accept and conform to the society of the English, however he isn’t fully English. Mr. Sawyer hates everything and anything that has to with Caribbean culture and so his only solitude to have “reminisce” about English culture and the “force” Eddie to just remain to his English side only. Also the story reveals the clash between the parents as well, “Mrs. Sawyer was not asleep. She put her head in at the door and looked at us, and I knew that she hated the room and hated the books…..The Encyclopedia Britannica, British Flowers, Birds and Beasts, various histories, books with maps, Froude’s English in the West Indies …” (Rhys, 2595). The books represent Mr. Sawyer and his English society and having Eddie and the narrator reading those books, to Mrs. Sawyer, makes it seems that they are conforming to the English and essentially leaving Mrs. Sawyer behind and forgotten. Even the passage was written after British Colonialism, it still ties back to facing pressure to conform to society. Despite for England’s main reason to colonizing the Caribbean islands, there were still some traces left of the colonialism which hints to pressure to