Smell In The Kitchen

In the beginning of the poem, the speaker states that women “milestone / [their] lives with oversights -- / living by the lights / of the loaf left / by the cash register…” The alliteration of the letter ‘l’ is used to emphasize the meaning of the statement. The statement insinuates that women are the ones who take care of food and cook, as shown by the word “loaf.” The speaker then informs of “the washing powder / paid for and wrapped, / the wash left wet.” The letter ‘w’ is used to emphasize

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

To begin with, the author’s implementation of short sentence fragments throughout the poem illustrates the exasperation and frustration bottled up in women in response to

The narration of the mother lecturing her daughter with commanding diction leads to the theme of women conforming to domesticity and if they don’t conform then they will lead a life of promiscuity that will affect the way people perceive them. Women in the past believed that a woman’s role was that of a domesticated housewife. The narration of the third point of view in this story and the commanding diction of it places an importance in the reinforcement of this idea, that if a woman doesn’t follow social norms, she will eventually turn to a “slut” one that her family will be ashamed of. She must set the table for lunch and for breakfast that is “how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know [her] very well, and that it the way they won’t recognize immediately the slut that [the mother has] warned her against becoming.”(Kincaid 485) through her commanding diction, the mother is telling her daughter how to set a table, how to cook, she

Have you ever hated doing the same thing every day? Marge Piercy is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Marge Piercy was born March 31, 1936, in Detroit at this time America was in a great depression. Her poems are inspired by her mother who was emotional and imaginative, her mother later died in 1985. In the poem “What’s That Smell in the Kitchen” the author show us the way women are sometimes held in low regards by men through the eyes of a tired housewife who does the same thing every day.

Ever since the days of World War I, women have been seen as second rate to men. They had to live up to many social standards that men didn’t have to and had strict guidelines on how to live their lives. This all changed when modernism deliberately tried to break away from Victorian Era standards in which women were subjugated to a lot more scrutiny. Ezra Pound, who was a large figure in the modernist movement, captured the spirit of the era in his famous line “Make it new!” Consequently, many writers started to experiment with many different and wild writing styles, which led to the short stories and poems we have today. The stories The Wife of His Youth and Mrs. Spring Fragrance were all written in this era of modernism. While they are written in a more traditional style of writing, both these stories have strong implications on feminism from the viewpoints of both male and female writers.

The delicious smell of the roasting turkey adds to the mix of wonderful aromas drifting through the house. My grandmother’s kitchen looks like a circus of pots, pans, and utensils spread out all over the place. However, it might look like a mess and cramped you can tell my grandmother and the other girls know what they are doing. It’s hard not to follow the scent of the buttery aroma of the fresh sweet rolls. Even though you know you’re supposed to stay out of the kitchen you keep finding yourself trying to get whatever mouthwatering food you can get your hands on. Every time you think your being sneaky, you finally think you successfully got a piece of food, but there’s always hand there to stop you.

The most merciless aspect of life is that it continues on even in the lives of significant others even after the death of the loved ones. In the novella ‘Kitchen’, the theme of alleviating the pain of losing family members is well illustrated by the author, Banana Yoshimoto. The novella, written in 1988, tells a story about a young girl, Mikage, who heals from the grief of her grandmother’s death, through and by helping her friend, Yuichi, to recover. The author seamlessly expresses significant changes in the characters, from despair to restoration, by depicting how people may look for comfort in such unusual ways.

 Marge Piercy is an American novelist, essayist, and poet best known for writing with a trademark feminist slant. In "What's That Smell in the Kitchen?" Marge Piercy explores the way women are sometimes held in low esteem by men through the eyes of a tired housewife who has had it with her monotonous day- to-day duties. In this poem, it is not stated that the speaker is a homemaker, but the reader is told about one woman in particular who is meant to express the feelings of women as a whole. The author conveys this central idea through imagery, figurative language, and devices of sound.

For centuries, women have had the role of being the perfect and typical house wife; needs to stay home and watch the children, cook for husbands, tend to the laundry and chores around the house. In her short story “Girl”, Jamaica Kincaid provides a long one sentence short story about a mother giving specific instructions to her daughter but with one question towards the end, with the daughter’s mother telling her daughter if she had done all the instructions to become a so called “perfect” woman, every man would want her. Kincaid’s structuring in “Girl,” captures a demanding and commanding tone. This short story relates to feminist perspectives. The mother expects a great deal from her daughter to have a certain potential and she does not hesitate to let her daughter understand that. As a matter of fact, the story is about two pages long, made into one long sentence - almost the whole time the mother is giving her daughter directions to follow - conveys a message to the reader that the mother demands and expects great potential in her daughter. The daughter is forced to listen and learn from what her mother is telling her to do to become the perfect housewife. Throughout the story, Kincaid uses the symbols of the house and clothing, benna and food to represent the meanings of becoming a young girl to a woman and being treated like one in society. Women are portrayed to appeal to a man to become the ideal woman in society, while men can do anything they please.

In traditional norms a person is influence by their culture with society rule based on how a person should handle the responsibility creating gender identities. Tradition comes into play with the aspect in how a female and male should conform to these identities (quote form source). It limits a women’s perspective of themselves because society habitually viewed women doing domestic household in the kitchen such as making food, cleaning, and taking care of people. Therefore, it creates gender expectations and people conform to this notion even to some extent in modern household. However, in the novel “Like water for Chocolate,” by Laura Esquivel views the kitchen as an individual source of creativity, encouragement, and the one thing that emerges

     Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife is the story of a relationship between a mother and daughter that is much more than it seems. This touchingly beautiful narrative not only tells a story, but deals with many of the issues that we have discussed in Women Writers this semester. Tan addresses the issues of the inequality given women in other cultures, different cultures' expectations of women, abortion, friendship, generation gaps between mothers and daughters, mother-daughter relationships, and the strength of women in the face of adversity. Tan even sets the feminist mood with the title of the book, which refers to a woman in Chinese Mythology who cared for a selfish man who became a

352). In today’s society there are no rules that prevent a person from doing all their laundry in the same day. A majority of people have probably learned from their parents or from experience that it doesn’t work so well if you wash whites and darks together; otherwise stating there are no instructions that come along with the task of laundry. In Kincaid’s (2011) story “Girl” the reader gathers the idea from the tone of the text, as it is the women’s role to do the laundry; whereas, in today’s society it is not always the woman completing the task of laundry. In some families, more often than less the women and men share the responsibility of doing laundry. In viewing the story “Girl” from a feminist perspective, another occurrence of gender roles would be the narrator’s statement “soak salt water fish overnight before you cook it” (Kincaid, 2011, p. 352). In the society that the story takes place, it is the woman’s responsibility to cook, compared to the twentieth century family, the meals may be prepared by every member of the family. Prior to the feminist laws women were treated with little to no respect for the things that they were expected to accomplish on a daily basis. In the era the story is written, women were often wives, housekeepers, cooks, and teachers. “This is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease,” and “this is how you sweep a

The poem “Mother Doesn’t Want a Dog” by Judith Viorst 1931, blends humor and rhyming in a poem that represents many male and female heads of household in their feelings toward owning a pet. a. The first paragraph talks about a dog having an odor, not being very smart and having bathroom issues at times when it is inconvenient. b. Second paragraph Mother has another problem with the dog not only losing hair but having problems with going to the bathroom.

Women were forced to be below men, but like the mushrooms in the poem, they would “widen the crannies,” and “shoulder through holes” (Plath, lines 17 & 18). Mushrooms are very agile organisms and will grow through many obstacles, usually by going through tinny “crannies,” cracks, and holes, just like how women would uses small holes to push through in order persevere in their quest for equality. The feminist movement was relatively new when mushrooms was written, and women at the time were forcing themselves out of their oppression. Many sexist ads from the time show how all women were supposed to be cleaning, cooking, taking care of the children, etc. yet, when all women were oppressed, they started a non-violent revolution, using “soft fists” in order to push for women’s equality (Plath, line 10).