All essays will contain a central plot and a central idea, of which the entire story will revolve itself. The two essays “Home Spaces: Fences and Neighbors” by Barrie Greenbie and Arron Fox’s essay “Out the Country: Space, Time, and Stereotype” share some central ideas. With the analysis of these two stories there will be many differences in how they present their ideas, but they do, in fact, share one central meaning. The two share a single meaning of one’s self being totally reflective of where they live and from where they come.
The two essays should be analyzed separately in order to understand each one and to help put their similarities into perspective. In Barrie Greenbie’s essay, he talks about how people’s homes provide a protected and safe place for the family unit that uses the home. He continually brings up how humans act in certain parts of their homes, the porches for example. What we do with them, be it using a porch as a buffer zone between the inside of our house to the outside of our shelter, can say a lot about us, that we are quiet and loners or outgoing and fun.
He talks about how animals that live in the forests will creep to the edge of the forest, but won’t completely come out. He compares this to how humans favor the porch because it offers a nice mix of being outside while still having the protection provided by the roof (Greenbie 250). He also explains his thoughts on how we use fences. We use fences to create a welcoming view for others, allowing them to come into our area visually, perhaps even mentally, but at the same time, we very firmly state that by use of a fence that one cannot enter physically because they would then be an intruder (Greenbie 251).
Greenbie then goes on to recognize the shift away from socialization of people to the privatization that we often see today. With the disappearance of front porches, we see people shifting to the use of back yards instead. The back yards are the first to get fences now. It can be seen that people have given up the porch for the patio, and the sense of security and privacy that comes with it away from the street and other people (Greenbie 255).
In Arron Fox’s essay, he focuses on where people live, and even more specifically, the “country.” Fox explains the country as that area outside the city, with farmhouses and rolling hills, that area that traveler’s merely pass through to get to the city. We look at the people who live in the country as people with obsessions, overworked bodies, and unwillingness to move into a city. Fox talks about how people who live in “the country” frequently invest a lot of time with the “bottle” (Fox 181).
Something he does that is very interesting is that he compares “the bottle” to the lord, saying that if people don’t have an addiction to the bottle then they probably do with the lord. This suggests that people out in the country frequently need to have something to cling to, whether it be alcohol or their faith (Fox 182). Another interesting concept is the sense of community that the people in these places have. They all greet each other at a bar that looks rather “sketchy” on the outside, and passersby would not realize what it is. The bar is windowless, giving the travelers an idea to just keep moving, and people with their fences and dogs. All giving a sense of not being welcome to travelers (Fox 185).
Both of these essays look into a broader sense of community for people, albeit different sorts of people. Greenbie focuses mainly on those sorts of people who live in suburbia, while Fox mainly focuses on those who live on the outskirts of town. We see both authors looking a lot at the way we as humans build our sense of community. Greenbie looks at things like cul-de-sacs and Fox looks at the wait people in the country are secluded. These are two different views of one concept, the concept of community.
Both authors do well explaining the same concept but from different areas. We see in Fox’s essay that those who live in the country aren’t very accepting of outsiders. We see this by the way he explains the windowless bars, the fences, and fierce dogs. Greenbie looks at this too, but in a less unwelcoming way. The way Greenbie explains the suburbia way of doing this is different. Those people will generally have a more welcoming look to them, by having lower fences, but we know that we still aren’t completely open as travelers to come in because their yards are fenced off, it allows a visual entrance but not a physical entrance. So suburbia is a little less subtle about how those from the outside are unwanted.
The two essays share many aspects and concepts with each other, but they are explained in different ways. Both Fox and Greenbie seem to be interested in the way we choose who we want to interact with all by the way we set up our living spaces. It’s a very interesting way of looking at people’s homes and people’s lives, definitely something that will change the look of things for anyone who reads these essays.
