Common Sense Yezierska Analysis

What is social expectation and how does it affects one’s life? In the short stories – “A Pair of Silk Stockings”, “A Shameful Affair”, and “The Story of Hour” – by Kate Chopin from the novel The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin, they uncover the expected roles and responsibilities of women in the early 1900s. Through imagery and diction, Chopin reveals that people tend to fall into others’ expectations upon their marriage and even before it, which leads to lose their personal freedom and gain desires in conflict with social expectations.

Sara faces a number of serious hindrances on her way to making a life of her own. One of them is her father, who she looks up to and starts to resent later on in life. Her father, Red Smolinsky wants his all daughters to fulfill their gender roles: maintain the household, take care of children, cook, etc. Women, in his opinion, do not exist without men and their own function is to serve men in all senses – sexual, psychological and spiritual. Red Smolinsky represents the Old World with its conservative view on the womanhood. She also starts to hate her father when she understands the ways he has denied his daughters, her older sisters, lives of their own. Sara tries to resist this “new” world and her

In Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, Sara proves to herself that she is her own hero by defying dated expectations of filial piety and lifting herself out of the life of poverty that she was born into. She builds herself up to be an independent member of society via her own achievements and lives her dream by overcoming the hardships of her parents’ Old World, and becoming a successful American. In the end, she strikes balance between still contributing to her family, and caring for herself. For Sara’s family, life in America was drastically less glamorous than they had anticipated when emigrating from Russia. The reality of America was an immediate let down and Sara’s family was hurled headlong into a life of poverty and hardship. Throughout

One person that is truly affected by her family limitations is Sara’s oldest sister Bessie. Bessie is known as the “burden bearer” of the family. The Smolinsky’s sincerely depend on Bessie to contribute her wages to the family’s well being, and it is apparent that if she seems to live up to her fathers standards to make good enough money, the family will certainly plummet into pieces. “And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter

In Vienna, people preferred to lie around and smoke.” Marjane hadn’t been use to this kind of behavior. In Vienna, lying around meant to be naked. She had been seen as an innocent, kind girl, but she really just wasn’t aware of this lifestyle. “That night, I really understood the meaning of “The Sexual Revolution”. It was my first big step toward assimilating into Western Culture.” This exposure to this new culture really changed her lifestyle. She was 16 at the time and was changing dramatically, physically and mentally. She grew seven inches and cut her hair short and spiked it up. She had not know what she had done to herself, but she was loved by the community with her new changes. She started making new friends and trying new things, such as drugs. She would pretend to smoke joints and be high. “The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules.” This made her feel awful and she decided to call her parents and ditched the look she was trying to

Once Sara arrived to her new house, Sara mentioned, “I picked the room with the bigger window because it reminded me of the balcony in Zagreb… But in the first few months I spent each day searching for the skyline for a building, craving something dirty or metal” (126). Sara was homesick. She could not get over the fact that she is a long way from Croatia and is living with two random strangers . With this homesickness, fear arose inside of her. Interestingly, in America she began to fear more of her life than she did back in Croatia where war was happening twenty-four seven. Back at the Safe House, she did not fear anything, she was a stone cold soldier. Although back in Croatia she payed little to no attention of what happened to her parents and decided not to sympathize her parents’ death until she arrived back in Zagreb releasing the floodgates from her eyes. So to counteract her fear Sara began to lie about herself and her past. “The more I lied, the closer I came to fitting in. Sometimes I even believed myself” (Nović 136). For Sara the lying made her forget about her past, she as well stop sending letters to Luka and stopped collecting newspaper clippings that reminded her of Croatia (137). Over time, Sara eased into the culture and her adoptive parents. “The first time I called Laura ‘Mom’ was an accident. I’d been

The society during Chopin’s time period was undergoing remarkable social changes in which the role of women, amongst other things, began to face a change. While America started progressing towards urbanization and industrialization, more women began to protest against their unequal social position. From society’s point of view, ideally, a woman’s place was at home. She was to maintain her role as a wife and a mother, while men would be in charge of secular affairs. Soon the concept of the “New Woman” came into being. In the 1890’s countless women’s organizations came together to demand an improvement of their living standards and get rid of inequality. The “New Woman […] rejected traditional stereotypes of woman as delicate, passive and domestic; she demanded, and began to move towards obtaining, education, careers, dress reform and suffrage.”

Living in a world where people are free and have the opportunity to be individuals is a world that Margaret Atwood’s main character, Offred, currently is having a hard time remembering. Thanks to her point of view we are able to see and understand what it must be like to live in the kind of world where life can mean so little to one. In this case, this group of people includes the ones that hold power in the government. This book makes one take a step back and look at what oneself is doing so that the reader can avoid everything that Offred had to deal with in her new life. For her life was not always like the way it is now in Gilead. She had rights, she had freedom, and most of all she had happiness. Over the years everything has changed and the people who have been most affected by this would be all women. They have become objects, tools, and instruments in which they are used to make their government prosper. Holding on to hope that one day things will go back to normal is no longer a thing that women can keep in mind. They worry about surviving, making it through until the next day, and never hearing or saying anything that they are not supposed to say or hear. In their new reality they try holding onto the past and who they really are, but the world they live in now is making that extremely hard. Day by day Offred explains to the reader how she manages to get by, but meanwhile we are also able to see the old side of her and can see that as every day passes it starts to

In the story Mrs. Mallard realizes that she can live by her own. Chopin writes, “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature” (51-53). This quote shows the feminist theory that it was assumed women were oppressed and shows the patriarchal ideology. Mrs. Mallard wills and freedom was in control of that man in the relationship. Marriage, in the story, appears as prison for Mrs. Mallard.

Palmer makes manifest society’s tendency to often give mothers of this generation ultimatums through personal accounts. Her use of examples not only derived from her mother but also from her peers seem to imply such a reality. Due to this reality many women have been unconsciously forced to give up one portion of her life. This is where her argument shines through as she attempts to explain to women of her generation that they are able to fill the role of a mother and of a worker. This is clearly demonstrated in her last paragraph when she uses the rhetorical device distinctio to show her definition of feminism in which “you can keep your job and your family”. As she argues her view she is revealing her purpose for writing her essay. She wishes

The novel of Anzia Yezierska Bread Givers talks about a Jewish family who immigrated to America and lived in Hester Street in the lower east side of New York. The Smolinsky family lived in starvation, the ones who financially support the family were the daughters rather than the father. As a Jewish father, Reb Smolinsky, does not work because he is focuses all his time on reading his holy books and demanding his daughter’s wages. Shaena Smolinsky is the mother who is always stressed about the poverty life they have, but she is also the supporter of her husband because she feels that he lives too much around his religious world rather than the real world. The older daughter Bessie, Mashah, and Fania struggle to find work. Bessie is the one oldest is the one who carries the burden of the house. Mashah is the prettiest sister and spends all of her wages on making herself more beautiful. Sara is the youngest sister and also the main character in this novel. Sara is the one who actually had the courage to stand up for her and rebel towards her father for not letting her make her own life. The Jewish tradition for women is to have arranged marriages, so Reb decided to look for someone to pair up his three daughters after the older daughters bring their loved ones home. He disapproved of the men his daughters brought because according to him they would not have a good life and he told them “a father known the future because he is older” (pg. 75). The first two daughters Reb

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” tries to shed light on the conflict between women and a society that assign gender roles using a patriarchal approach. Specifically Margaret Bauer highlights, that most of Chopin’s works revolves around exploring the “dynamic interrelation between women and men, women and patriarchy, even women and women” (146). Similarly, in “The Story of an Hour” Chopin depicts a society that oppresses women mostly through the institution of marriage, as women are expected to remain submissive regardless of whether they derive any happiness. The question of divorce is not welcome, and it is tragic that freedom of women can only be realized through death. According to Bauer, the society depicted in Chopin’s story

Added to this prejudice against women in general, was the specific devaluation of a woman without material wealth. A woman’s life centered in the home and the indisputable number one goal for any young woman was to find a husband. Only then could she overcome the disgrace of being single and poor and only then was she awarded some level of respect and dignity from family, friends, and society. In this context, an unmarried woman was viewed as a financial drain and a burden to her family. To make matters worse, there was the legal statuate, called entailment, that would not allow a father to leave his estate to his daughters. Entailment required that an estate pass from father to a son or male heir. This posed a hardship for the Bennet family and in the event of Mr. Bennet’s untimely death, the estate would go to a nephiew, causing Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters to lose their home and financial security. I As a result of these values and social norms, a woman’s sense of identity and self-worth was completely wrapped up in finding a suitable husband. It was completely understandable for a young woman to feel like she was “helping out” her family by finding a husband and setting up a

Another thing that womanhood or motherhood encapsulates in this novel is the choice to choose between staying in a polygamous marriage or walk out, without being seen as weak or revolting. Ramatoulaye is portrayed as an example of individual identity and choice. She chooses to marry Modou against her family’s wishes (Letter 16); And when confronted with the same dilemma as her friend Aissatou – a polygamous husband, she chooses a different path – she looks inward, cut her loses and makes the decision that seem unreasonable to others even her children. She knows that after thirty years of marriage and twelve children, putting herself on the dating scene would be a waste of time. She knows according to the woman in Simone Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex, “her flesh is no longer bounties for men” (590), and even when her neighbor Farmata, the griot encourages her leave her marriage, Ramatoulaye knowing herself more than anyone else, she writes “I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes took in the mirror’s eloquence. I had lost my slim figure, as well as ease and quickness of movement…I could not delude myself: youth was deserting my body” (Letter 41). I see the internalized patriarchal value that a woman needs a man to survive in this portion of the letter. If remarriage is not the priority of an abandoned woman, the society has no right to force her to, or berates her for choosing to stay single.

Just as millions of other families, the Smolinsky family came to America for a better life after enduring economic hardships in their home country of Russia. The Smolinsky family is made up of Reb Smolinsky (the father), Shena Smolinsky (the mother), Bessie, Fania, Mashah, Sara. They all play a crucial role in the family’s progress in America. Reb Smolinsky is seen as the head of the family; he spends his nights and days reading the Torah and providing his family with stories from the various books he reads. He constantly patronizes his family by pointing out their flaws and even proceeds to tell them about their doomed future in both the present and next life. His dream is to marry his daughters to wealthy men in the search to boost his economic status. He continually tries to marry his daughters to affluent men but fails, only Fania marries a wealthy man. This however does not end up helping elevate the family’s economic status. He later opens a store and marries another woman when his wife passes away. Shena Smolinsky is the mother. She and Reb Smolinsky were arranged into marriage before they even knew one another. Shena married Reb and never truly got to live out her life as intended. She wanted something more than just tending to her husband’s needs and wants. She never got to live out her dream, she remained submissive to her husband till the end of her days. Bessie is the eldest daughter; she is the one that bears the most responsibilities in the Smolinsky family due