Maureen Tolman Flannery's "Half-Baked"

Flannery titled her poem “Half-Baked” because she is describing her life as she is writing this poem and remember how her grandmother baked her bread. Before baking, dough must be prepared by mixing the ingredients, forming into a mound, and kneading the dough so it is just right for baking. If one thinks about it, preparing dough is just like preparing for life, learning and growing and making mistakes. In the first stanza, Flannery description of kneading “life's dough/with one hand only” how she is slowing evolving and turning and making adjustments to life and it's lessons. It is described again as she is “holding the pen to cross out words,/ glutonous, glossy, leavened, vicious,/ record[ing] the memory of fresh bread”. Flannery uses the imagery of her grandmother's baking to make the reader understand the kneading of life.

 

Flannery starts her poem in the first stanza describing her life as kneading through dough, comparing it to kneading and preparing the dough “press[ing] it's plumpness, fold[ing] its flour/ back into itself again and again,/ learning to delight in the honeyed yeast smell.” Then she changes her focus in the second stanza describing her writing “at the same time/ holding a pen to cross out words,” while recalling her grandmother making bread. Flannery is making a comparison to how her grandmother is making her bread to how Flannery is writing her poem and describing her struggles with life's lessons. The kneading of the dough is a metaphor of how one must knead through the struggles of living and making their own life.

 

Women throughout the centuries have had to work through the many challenges that faced them as the submissive sex. For example, before women's liberation, a women was expected to be stay-at-home mother or wife. The 1800's were a time when women were only housewives and mothers and very few worked outside the home. In fact, these women were seen as unusual if they did pursue a profession outside the home. During the fight for the vote in the 1920's, women were persecuted for their actions on the soapboxes and in rallies. Also during the 1960's, when women were breaking out of the norm of the 1950's wife and mother, it was unexpected for them to think about being unhappy because their roles were destined for them to be the stay-at-home parent, not the breadwinner. The role of a woman has evolved over the last century and is still evolving, but it is not without it's struggles.

 

I have had my struggles in evolving as a woman. I came from parents from the 1960's era, and my mother and father had plans outlined for me as their oldest and smartest child: to go to college, study Business and make a lot of money. However, when I was in college at 19, I was unhappy because I felt like I really didn't fit in with all the other students because they had a plan to transfer to a UC or a CSU. I didn't even know if a four-year education was in my plan, much less what I wanted to do. I even was at a crossroads because I didn't even know who I was and what my destiny was—I knew business was not the road for me. Like the narrator, I spent the next ten or so years, trying clerical jobs, looking at other opportunities and path, reading self-help books, kneading through the world and it's obstacles trying to find my place in it. Eventually, I did find my niche as a library clerk, and have spent the last two years getting my BA so I can move onto library school. Though it was not the ideal path my parents wanted me to take to get here, they are proud of my journey and that I have completed my degree and set out my own destiny.