Katherine Mansfield 's The Garden Party

Since Lynn was a busy town of commerce and trade, the middle-class inhabitants were wealthy. The status of Margery?s father, John, several times mayor of Lynn, helped to instill Margery with self-respect. She was very much influenced by the people of Lynn?s concern with status and wealth: ?She had a very great envy of her neighbors that they should be as well arrayed as she.? In her Book, she even goes so far as to say that her marriage to businessman John Kempe did no justice to her ?worthy kindred? and was a socially-imbalanced relationship, although they both belonged to the same social class. This haughtiness and sense of pride are distinguishing features of Margery throughout her life.

The two housewives have a passionate love for gardening and bestow their love and appreciation towards their gardens. In the twentieth century, gardening was advocated as beneficial to one’s life and family. In the New England Quarterly, the journal, “Gardening as ‘Women’s Culture’ in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Short Fiction,” states,“The time women spent in

The Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age describe an era of prosperity and entertainment. With fancy parties, cars, houses, and a multitude of wealth, people go about their day with frivolity. However, not all were willing to accept the social changes that goes with the 1920s. One such novel that addresses the liberal era and some reluctance is Eudora Welty’s novel Delta Wedding. Beginning with Laura McRaven travelling to visit her extended family, the Fairchilds, at their plantation in the Mississippi Delta, she experiences the turmoil surrounding her departed mother’s family: the uproar of the oncoming wedding, the tension between her aunts, and the difficulties one must face in becoming a Fairchild. Despite Laura playing the main role of the novel, Welty uses her minor character Robbie Reid to explore the compact Southern family and the polarity between precedent archetypes and the liberal woman of the 1920s.

The setting and time period of this story supports the adventurous innocence of its youthful characters, as well as enriching the story’s momentous and climactic confrontation between the forward-looking Mona, and her more traditional mother, Helen.

The Glass Castle is about a very poor family that constantly moves from place to place just to seemingly stay alive. The book addresses the many social issues that we deal with every day. One of the most important social issues disputed on a daily basis are the kind of parents we want to be and what we want to teach our children for their future. In this memoir we are able to see how Rex and Rosemary Walls teach their children the values of everyday life. The parents try to teach their children that whatever life throws at you, you can handle it with resilience. The parents accomplished the goals for their children by telling them that they loved them and to never give up. The Walls children gained exceptional values that may not have been learned had these children grown up with different parents. Both parents in the Glass Castle ultimately help Jeannette and the rest of her family become the people they are today, and would not have been able to accomplish this without the parents.

Through Tea Cake’s character, Zora Neale Hurston shows that society is destructive. Whenever there is a group of people living together, “society” is inescapable. Tea Cake pretends to be a man who is not consumed with the evilness of society, however, Tea Cake’s influence on Janie forces her to become weak and dependent. Uncovering society’s faults force Janie to become aware of her situation, and become a realistic person, rather than the romantic she has always

If Jasper Jones hadn’t shown me the cigarette burns on his shoulders just hours before, if I hadn’t touched their ugly pink pucker with my fingertips, I wouldn’t have suspected this man to be the monster he was’ (p. 160) Charlie’s mother, Ruth, cultivates her image as a good mother and citizen, member of the CWA and volunteer for all manner of civic events. She demands obedience and respect from Charlie and is capable of a quasi-hysterical response when she doesn’t receive it. Yet she is carrying on a clandestine affair with an unnamed man from the back seat of a car. Charlie’s disappearance compromises Ruth’s image: ‘I’d shattered the facade, I’d sullied the family name and her repute. Tongues were wagging. Aspersions were being cast like dandelion spores on hot gossipy winds. The CWA brigade and the badminton babblers were tutting like vultures. I was no longer a model child and she was no longer a model mother. And a snide, petty part of me was thrilled about it, almost proud’ (p. 198-199) When Charlie finds his mother in a compromising position with a man who is not his father it shifts the power balance between them (p. 244). At this moment, Ruth loses her moral authority over Charlie and in some ways Charlie ceases to be a ‘child’. He must assume responsibility for his own moral stance. Pete Wishart, Laura and Eliza’s father, is probably the most hypocritical character in the novel. Whenever Charlie mentions him, he almost invariably remarks that he is

As hardworking women living of the prairie, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters can relate to Mrs. Wright’s situation. They know personally that long days of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning can become very tiresome (Hedges 91). They realize that living on the prairie can force a woman to be confined to her own house for weeks at a time, and because Mrs. Wright never had children, the grueling loneliness that she suffered must have been excruciating. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters both experience the constant patronization and sexual discrimination that most women in the early twentieth century lived with. They empathize with the difficulties of Mrs. Wright’s life and almost immediately a bond is formed with a woman they do not even know.

The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls reveals one look into a dysfunctional family. This personal memoir is full of lessons of redemption and reliance for all. Jeannette and her siblings thrived with parents whose beliefs and stubborn ways of life, changed their children’s’ lives forever. Though their parent’s dreadful actions, the children tried to fend for them. Rex, a very brilliant man, when sober and Rose Mary, an inspirational artist, when not a panhandler risked their own lives daily. Even though Rex and Rose Mary’s lives were unstable at times, they would instill lessons into their children. Their philophies in life I believe relied on one another, which taught their children some

“The Dinner Party” by Mona Gardner is a short story about how control can really affect a situation and how being able to stay calm in a crisis no matter what gender you are. The hostess proves that woman can have the same amount of control as men have when she was placed in a stressful situation. A naturalist

The Glass Castle is an enthralling story of Jeannette Walls’s extraordinary childhood riddled with unfortunate circumstance after circumstance. With her parents unable to hold steady jobs, Jeanette and her siblings became accustomed to constantly running from bill collectors, living in a continuous cycle of hazardous, disheveled homes, never knowing when or where their next meal was going to come from. Her memoir begins with the rehashing of a trip she took as an adult to attend a party in New York City's Upper East Side. As Walls glances out the window of her taxi, she spots her mother, Rosemary, rummaging through the garbage. Jeanette panics and promptly turns back home, first worrying about her professional image hoping no one will see the two of them together. But then she worries on a much deeper level about her mother's wellness, being cold, homeless, and alone in the New York winter. Following this, Jeanette has a lunch meeting with her mother which prompts Jeannette to contemplate her parents' unfortunate voluntary lifestyle and the childhood she had with such unstable and erratic “role models.”

In the opening of her novel, Kingsolver introduces many families and touches on the topics of financial struggles, strong mother-daughter bonds, and the hardships that many families encounter. To begin with, the narrator, Taylor, mentions that her family, “ were any better than Hardbines or had a dime to our name… And for all I ever knew of my own daddy, I can’t say we weren’t, except for Mama swearing up and down that he was nobody I knew...” (2). The author makes it obvious that the narrator’s family consists of Taylor and her single mother, Alice Greer; although the narrator is raised in a non-traditional, financially challenged family, her mother embeds great confidence in her:...

Within the novel A Room with a View, E. M. Forster explores the differences between 2 social classes. A young woman of upper class by the name of Lucy Honeychurch has traveled from a luxury estate in England to Italy where she will unlock new characteristics of herself. What Lucy did not know was that on her trip her world would take a complete 180-degree turn towards a perspective that is distinctly different than what she is taught to believe. Italy allows Lucy to meet impactful and influential people, such as the Emersons and Mrs. Lavish, who encourage to explore her mind and question her preconceived notions regarding both her place in society and individual desires for happiness.

James’ novella centers around a young governess who is in charge of watching her employer’s kids at an estate in Bly. The governess’ social standing and desire to keep her job reveal the instability of jobs for women in this era. Her employer, the uncle of Miles and Flora, is a typical wealthy

‘’Bliss’’ is a short story written by Katherine Mansfield in 1918.The story focuses on a day of Bertha Young who is a lovely, restless and kind of hysterical woman. She is married Harry and they have a little baby called as ‘’Little B’’ and on that day, they invite their friends,-the Norman Knights, Eddie Warren and Pearl Fulton- for a dinner. During all this conventional scene, we, as readers, witness the journey of Bertha from ignorance to awareness about her love and sexual desire for another woman, Miss Fulton. Mansfield reveals Bertha’s sexual orientation through the technique of symbolism by using many lively and colorful images such as a pear tree, moon and a walled garden.