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Differences Between Flora and Mother Essay example

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There is an infinite number of personalities and the best art works portray them vividly and truthfully. Some people are practical, while others are more abstract. In the comedic novels about family life, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) and Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother's Boarders by Rosemary Taylor (1943), the practical characters are in the forefront. While representing different life phases due to their age difference, Gibbons's main character Flora Poste is quite similar in her life views and actions to Taylor's Mother. The central theme is the conflict between notions of practicality and romance, reflected by the actions of the heroines, which happen to be heavily affected by their unconventional upbringings. …show more content…

Both heroines' personalities are heavily affected by their rather unconventional childhoods. Since Mother was born right after the Civil War and had gone through the hard and poverty-stricken times in the South, “[t]here was something Spartan” in her nature and her seizing any possibility for making money (57). Flora's childhood was marked by her hardly knowing her parents and attending various schools, where she could hardly fit in. Overall, the theme of unconventional childhoods is one of the major themes of both novels. Most of the characters of Cold Comfort Farm seem to have psychological issues, which they developed from their childhoods. Ada Doom's seeing “something nasty in the woodshed” made a dominating and miserable being out of her (171). She brought up her daughter, Judit Starkadder, as an emotionally unstable. It resulted in Judith's obsession with her son, Seth Starkadder. The inferred Seth's molestation by his mother had resulted in him developing psychological issues of his own, including hate towards women and sexual promiscuity. On the contrary, Mother's and Flora's stern upbringing molded them into practical and realistic people, as well as allowed them to manipulate their surrounding characters. The novels are insightful to one of the human nature's desires of changing others. Both heroines change the lives of the whole cast of different characters, instead of allowing the environments to change them. They introduce other female characters to

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