Short Story : Ranch Girl By Maile Meloy

In Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole's departure of America and search for identity leads him on a tortuous journey. Sprouting in San Angelo, Texas, John Grady Cole blossoms into life on a ranch his grandfather presides over. His grandfather dies when he is just sixteen, causing him to depart America - the country he once called home - with his best friend Lacey Rawlins for Mexico, to be cowboys. As he explores the southern country, he feels that Mexico is exactly where he belongs. But, during his visit, he runs into trouble as he falls in love with a ranch owner's daughter who comes from a strictly traditional family, he is jettisoned in a moral-absent jail, and he stabs a man to death. Because Cole has nowhere else

Everyone wants to believe that they are beautiful. For this reason, we tend to seek out that approval from others including our parents, friends, and other loved ones. Flannery O'Connor's story, "Good Country People," focuses on this particular theme. In her narrative, a young girl named Joy Hopewell longs for her mother's approval. When she does not find it, Joy begins to believe that she is unworthy of anyone's admiration. This basic premise allows for Manley Pointer to easily win Joy's trust. Flannery O'Connor includes this string of events in order to show the significant role parents play in developing their children's self-esteem, as well as reveal that even though Joy Hopewell begins to believe that she is not beautiful, she

Thus, he treats her like a child and “laughs at [her]… ” and calls her a “‘...little girl’” (Gilman 90, 94). For these two female characters in “A Rose for Emily” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”, their struggles are a direct result of male dominance, and their coping mechanism escorts them away from the world that devalues them.

In a journey across the vast untamed country of Mexico, Cormac McCarthy introduces All the Pretty Horses, a bittersweet and profoundly moving tale of love, hate, disappointments, joy, and redemption. John Grady sets out on horseback to Mexico with his best friend Lacey Rawlins in search of the cowboy lifestyle. His journey leaves John wiser but saddened, yet out of this heartbreak comes the resilience of a man who has claimed his place in the world as a true cowboy. In his journey John’s character changes and develops throughout the novel to have more of a personal relationship with the horses and Mother Nature. He changes from a young boy who knows nothing of the world

The life of a ranch girl is unknown to many people across America. In Maile Meloy’s Ranch Girl, a female narrator brings the reader into her hard life being raised as a ranch girl. Through many different literary devices including, tone, mood, and characterization, the writer set the reader to feel everything the narrator depicts and the reader ingested with a heavier impact than the reader anticipates. The obligation to the community for the ranch girl is to break all stereotypes, thus showing her community and all ranch girls alike that she can be successful and break free of the ranch girl life.

Social standards may confine individuals from pursuing their own personal interests. Through the relationship between societal standards and individual interests, Sandra Cisneros’ short story, “Woman Hollering Creek,” introduces the roles of men and women in a Hispanic culture. The protagonist, Cleofilas Hernandez, is trapped in an abusive relationship with her newly-wed husband, Juan Pedro. However, Cleofilas tolerates the toxic relationship due to the social norms of her society, which reveals that the Hispanic culture revolves around a patriarchal society and that women have to be submissive to their husbands. As the story progresses, Cleofilas abandons the gender norm to lead an independent lifestyle.

The house is where she belongs to. “She gonna make a mess.“; the ranch is not the place for women and she will ruin everything. She is described as a “jailbait” by George, a threat that can be always triggered to him. Two quotations reflect that women has no position in the ranch and they can’t be a part of the ranch life. She is driven away by the men, she is an obstacle in their eyes. Even a prostitute could gain more respect than her, “Old Susy”, and at the weekend, everyone went into town and left her at the ranch. her image reflects the faith of women in US 's 20s-30s society, has no rights, freedom and

The Pitchfork Ranch is one of the most historic ranches in west Texas. The Pitchfork Ranch has been owned by the same family for more than a century. On December 13, 1883 the Pitchfork Ranch was bought with 52,500 acres of land in west Texas. It was started with 9,750 head of cattle. It’s the only ranch in west Texas that didn’t have to downsize during the Great Depression. Today the Pitchfork Ranch is spread over 162,000 acres in west Texas. It spreads over Dickens and King Counties (Nordyke). This paper will discuss various topics about the Pitchfork Ranch, from the history of it to how they work their horses, cattle, and everyday maintaining the ranch. The Pitchfork Ranch has many different kinds of income. Its main income comes from cattle, but they also have mineral rights to the land and they just recently started drilling oil. They also have 500 acres of farmland which they sale some of the crops but they mainly use it to feed the cattle crop every year. They also have a feedlot at the ranch headquarters. The feedlot is a necessity because they have over 5,000 head of calves every year, and it’s a lot more economical to feed them out on the ranch, instead of selling them for a lower price whenever they’re younger (Ranch). The Pitchfork has been in operation over one hundred years, and it has only been through seven ranch managers. The current ranch manager is Bob Moorehouse, he has been the manager since 1987. “I love this way of life, there is

Vic Lang, one of the central characters, is arguably most affected by the constraints society places on gender — succumbing to romanticised ideologies.

John Grady Cole, the last in a long line of west Texas ranchers, is, at sixteen, poised on the sorrowful, painful edge of manhood. When he realizes the only life he has ever known is disappearing into the past and that cowboys are as doomed as the Comanche who came before them, he leaves on a dangerous and harrowing journey into the beautiful and utterly foreign world that is Mexico. In the guise of a classic Western, All the Pretty Horses is at its heart a lyrical and elegiac coming-of-age story about love, friendship, and loyalty that will leave John Grady, and the reader, changed forever. When his mother decides to sell the cattle ranch he has grown up working, John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins

The author shows us that despite her attractiveness and exquisiteness, she may merely be deemed a shallow, secretive and opportunistic person.

In the opening scene of Jane Martin’s “Rodeo,” there are many stereotypical props used to portray the beer-drinking, hard-working, cowboy image with the characteristic country music playing as an added touch. Most people are familiar with this type of scene in their minds, with a man as the character, but not this time – we find a tough, smart, opinionated woman with a distinctively country name of Lurlene, and the typical cowboy kind of nickname, Big Eight. The reader will dive deeper into the true character of this unusual woman and realize that she is no different from the average woman in today’s workforce. She is feeling the frustration of discrimination and the push out of the only lifestyle that she knows, by “Them” (1667).

From this moment on, every acceptable quality she has will mean absolutely nothing to her. As long as she has her big nose and her two thick legs, that is all she will see herself as wholly. This leads her to thinking about permanently removing her unwanted flaws. She believes that if she removes her flaws, she will finally be accepted by society. In both stories, the reader interprets that both the woman and the young girl have specific qualities that someone in their lives has pointed out as flaws. The opinions of these certain people obviously matter to both of them, so they eventually decide that they want their flaws removed for good.

Every individual struggle with self-acceptance at some point in their life, furthermore, every individual chooses to exemplify their struggle to accept themselves in different methods. In the short story “Boys and Girls” Alice Munro focuses on the narration of a girl, in which girls are underappreciated in the society. The protagonist in the story cannot accept who she is, and it makes it harder for her as other individuals do not accept who she wishes to be. The author demonstrates this through the character’s external motivations. As the story is written in third person limited readers understand the girl’s personal thoughts and how she is internally conflicted about who she is. She feels underappreciated for the work that she provides which influences her to be disobedient to others around her. Alice Munroe’s short story “Boys and Girls” demonstrates to readers that individuals struggle for self-acceptance through the expression of their external and internal motivations. Because of their motivations, individuals feel rebellious against their self-conscience.

In this essay I aim to describe how life was like on a ranch during