Mary Gaitskill

    “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” one of O’Connor’s best works, describes a family on a trip to Florida and their encounter with an escaped prisoner, The Misfit. Although “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is an early work in O’Connor’s career, it contains many of the elements which are used in the majority of her short stories. The grandmother, a selfish and deceitful woman, is a recipient of a moment of grace, despite her many flaws and sins. A moment of grace is a revelation of truth. When the grandmother calls The Misfit her child and reaches out to touch him, the grandmother has a moment of grace that enabled her to see The Misfit as a suffering human being who she is obligated to love. The grandmother realizes that nothing will stop The Misfit from killing her but she reaches out to him despite this. The Misfit rejects her love and kills her anyway. This moment of grace is very important

Although the daughter’s shame in her mother is evident, she is also prideful of her as well. The strong love that the mother and daughter share is pervasive throughout the story. The story is being told by the daughter after she is all grown up. The fact that Jones uses such vivid detail on the mother’s preparation for her daughters first day of school shows that the daughter loved her mom and all that she did for her. The daughter recalls that her mother spent a lot of time preparing her when she says, “My mother has uncharacteristically spent nearly an hour on my hair that morning, plaiting and replaiting so that now my scalp tingles.” (Jones) She also remembers that her “pale green slip and underwear are new, the underwear having come three to a plastic package with a little girl on the front who appears to be dancing.” (Jones) The daughter having remembered details like these illustrate that she has an immense love and takes pride

The most difficult time in a child's relationship with his/her parents is mainly during its teenage years. These are times of rebellion, disagreement, strong emotion, psychological changes and sexual experimentation just to name a few. In Mary Gaitskill's short story "Tiny, Smiling Daddy", the main theme "of how people seek intimacy but don't know how to achieve it" (Gaitskill, 289) is conveyed by the author through the characters, symbolism and setting and imagery.

While James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues” depicts the connection between two brothers, Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing” represents the bond between a mother and her daughter. Both Baldwin and Olsen focus on family relationships and how emotional support vs neglect have an effect on family members. Also, each author conveys a message of finding self-identity even amidst adversity, while including the symbolism of everyday objects. Furthermore, Baldwin compares light and darkness throughout his story, and Olsen has the mother scrutinize her actions in an interior monologue.

There is a deep emotional attachment towards the story “Kabnis,” that the author felt: “I want Kabnis to remain an immediate record of my first contact with Southern life” (Foley 156). As mentioned earlier, Toomer traveled to Sparta in late September 1921, “a year when more lynchings occurred throughout the South than in any previous years other than 1909” (158). In fact, there were about 429 total of lynchings just in Georgia during that year. Toomer based the lynching of Mame Lamkins on real life Mary Turner: “They kill her in th street, an some white man seein th risin in her stomach as she lay there soppy in her blood like any cow, took an ripped her belly open, an the kid fell out. It was living; but a nigger baby aint supposed t live.

The freedom and right to be able to freely express thoughts, opinions, and concerns are critical in the efficiency and fluency of American and Canadian democracy. With such a large and vast nation, there is bound to be a parallel in size of diverse thinking and perspective. In order to properly and directly voice these opinions,there needs to be a type of media to do so with. In her 1854 editorial, Mary Ann Shadd Cary goes on to discuss the importance of one particular form of media; the newspaper. Cary is able to explain that need for expression of opinion through media, the need for “colored canadians” to specifically have their own paper, and that need to inform misinformed citizens on Canada’s issues through her own style of diction to

Few relationships are as deep as those between child and parent. While circumstance and biology can shape the exact nature of the bond, a child’s caretaker is the first to introduce them to the world. And as they grow and begin to branch out, children look to their parents as a model for how to interact with the various new situations. Through allusion, potent imagery, and nostalgic diction, Natasha Trethewey constructs an idolized image of a father guiding their child through life’s challenges only to convey the speaker’s despair when they are faced with their father’s mortality in “Mythmaker.”

Storytelling has been used for all of human existence to pass down ideas and morals. Writing was just the next step in allowing additional individuals to have access to the multitude of new stories being created. When different people read the same story, they are able to glean different things from it. This is due to the fact that people read the stories on different levels and with differing viewpoints. Upon the first reading of “Dream Children”, by Gail Godwin, a reader may view the story as a timeless, boring love story. However, if a reader dives into the story from a feministic approach, one sees a deeper plot where Mrs. McNair is imprisoned by societal norms and longs for an understanding of her feelings and desires.

The short story “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid was a bittersweet warning from a mother to her daughter. The reader is experiencing the viewpoint of the protagonist through the soliloquy of her mother’s instructions that batter her like bugs smacking the

Dr. Diana Baumrinds’ research on the various parenting methods are directly mirrored in the parents that influence Sophie. The narrator of the short story closely resembles Dr. Baumrind’s first method of parenting, authoritarian. Dictating Sophie’s actions can be traced back to her cultural background, with a high stress on obedience and discipline she often times forces Sophie to conform

Feminism and Historicism play a major part in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Good Country People”, first published in 1955. The story focuses on the importance of identity and the parallels between truth and deception. In “Good Country People”, the Hopewell family, maintain a small farm in rural Georgia with the help of tenants the Freemans. The pious Mrs. Hopewell’s mottos ‘nothing is perfect’ and ‘it takes all kinds to make the world’ are manifested in her unmarried thirty-two year old daughter, Joy who later changes her name to Hulga, wears a prosthetic wooden leg because of a childhood accident. Hulga who has a Ph.D. in Philosophy, cannot advance her academic aspirations because of a weak heart; because of this she must live in her

In Mary Rowlandson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Rowlandson, ethnocentric bias is clearly evident throughout the entire narrative. Ethnocentrism is the judgment of other cultures according to the standards of one's own cultural values or being closed-minded about the lifestyle of another ethnic and/or cultural group. Mary Rowlandson's narrative has many examples supporting the notion that Puritans are ethnocentric in their worldview.

Some critics have argued that Richard Wright’s women are “flat, one dimensional stereotypes, portrayed primarily in terms of their relationship to the male character”. (Quote, p540) However, in Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright resents three very distinct types of female characters who did not fit this description. Wright portrays women as an Avenger, a Sufferer and a Mother figure whose actions propel the stories to their final conclusion. In the story “Bright and Morning Star” Wright places the protagonist, Aunt Sue, in a domestic environment. “Her hands followed a lifelong ritual of toil” (pg222) as she cleans and cooks. Interestingly, Aunt Sue is the only heroine in the stories, who shows a different type of bravery than perhaps shown by

Mary Kingsley and Mary Slessor were both Victorian women who defied expectations of female Victorian ideal by being independent and active women. The fact both never married is a very significant defiance of that ideal, though Kingsley supposed had a romantic involvement with Matthew Nathan, the Jewish Governor of Sierra Leone towards the end of her life. However, both had very imperialist mindsets, though to varying degrees. Slessor believed that Africans benefited from British authority, that it “…did not mean a loss of liberty but the opposite,” that it had created “a ‘just’ legal order (Proctor 40). Kingsley believed in the doctrine in indirect rule over British colonies, to not damage the African indigenous culture.

Sarah, Plain and Tall is an exceptional book due to its portrayal of what is often a difficult situation for some families. Being told from children’s perspective, readers are able to take on the children’s emotions during this time. When the children fear that their new mother may leave them, the reader shares that fear. However,