Stripping and Remolding Identities
Xingyuan Shen
Expository 101
Kelly Roberts
September 5th 2017
Stripping and Remolding Identities
Identity, being seen as a main constituent part of each individual, differs from person to person and changes throughout one’s life. The main factors that influence people’s identities can be classified as external forces and internal motives. The two articles from Karen Ho and Susan Faludi can demonstrate this idea. In Biographies of Hegemony, Karen Ho discusses how employers in Wall Street only hire Harvard and Princeton graduates, no matter what their majors. Susan Faludi’s essay “The Naked Citadel” talks how each cadet’s individuality being removed by the citadel. The harsh rules executed by the fourth-class system at The Citadel is “intended to ‘strip’ each young recruits of his original and remold him into the ‘whole man’ ”(75). “Strip” means to get rid of something, and “remold” refers to the reformation of something. Similarly, Harvard and Princeton graduates who do not major in or take interest in finance are influenced to “strip” their own identities which in this case are their original interests and majors, and then “remold” to have the same identities with anyone else who works on Wall Street. By referring Ho and Faludi’s essay, I argue that internal desires as well as external forces can strip and remold people’s own identities to make themselves fit into a new group and have the similar identities with other group members. However, this de-individualizing process would result in a series of negative consequences like unfairness and discrimination towards people outside their groups and hinders the institutions’ growth.
Internal desires such as high status, wealth, respect, and success motivate people to strip their original identities so they can be a part of Wall Street and The Citadel. People have a lot desires, and they strive for them unremittingly in some ways, for instance, by abandoning their original identities. Being able to work on the Wall Street is a big attraction for graduates, since many things provided by Wall Street meet their internal desires, as Ho introduces an undergraduate writer’s saying writes, “these banking firms provide us with a way to maintain our elite status in society by providing avenues to wealth and power that other professions do not”(179). Wall Street confers onto people the benefits like high status, great wealth and power that are as irresistible as they are rare--they cannot get them from other careers. Therefore, in order to get these precious benefits, graduates from these two Ivy schools who do not even major in investment banking or financial consulting are willing to give up their original majors and interests to join the Wall-Street family. Similarly, the cadets in the citadel also pursue what they want by striping and remolding their own identities. In the time of 19 century, people who possess great masculinity were more likely to get respect from others and then achieve success. Therefore, masculinity becomes the main identity which people long for, and the citadel is one choice for these people to be masculine and achieve their goals. After the citadel was reopened in 1882, “Its new mission was to reinvigorate the masculinity of the South by showing its men how to compete with the business and industrial skills of the Yankee carpetbaggers”(79). Since cadets can gain masculinity through joining the citadel, they unconditionally obey the harsh and brutal the rules under the fourth-class system in the citadel, which allows them to be more masculine and thus getting rid of insecurity. Consequently, this helps them receive respect and thus being closer to success. In short, both the graduates and the cadets strip and remold their own identities due to their internal desires,
While internal forces which are personal incentives play an important role in striping and remolding people’s identities, external forces like others’ view opinions and the fourth-class system can also influence people on changing identities. In Biographies of Hegemony, one graduate from either Harvard or Princeton said, “They bombard us with food, mail, Princeton alumni connection, and they keep telling us we are qualified, we are perfectly qualified, even though we’ve never ‘held a real job’ ”(186). The words “perfectly qualified” really motivate people’s decision on being a Wall Streeter, because they come from the recruiters on Wall Street -the center of “the smartest people”. As these graduates have also been influenced by the ingrained mind from others that the most successful and the smartest people do investment banking and financial consulting, they