Stone Mattress

Paul Newman once said, “People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked” (74). There is no such thing as the perfect relationship, however, being involved in a healthy relationship is essential for a person to feel valued, safe, and happy. Unfortunately, in the situation of Kelly Sundberg’s personal essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” and Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of An Hour,” include extreme examples of unhealthy relationships. The essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” shares painful experiences of Sundberg’s physical and emotional abusive relationship with her husband Caleb, while “The Story of an Hour,” shares a rare reaction of a married woman, Louise Mallard, who explores her emotions cautiously when hearing about the death of her husband. Each woman faces their own prison created by their husbands. The two marriages represent the figurative meaning of doors being locked in a marriage. Both pieces of literature convey the theme of confinement by using the literary devices of foreshadowing, imagery, and conflict.

Every day begins with fear; every night ends with a different strange man. In a touching novel about the horrific life of a thirteen year-old Nepalese girl, Lakshmi, Patricia McCormick uses a fictional story to portray the lives of real girls. McCormick introduces the reader to the harsh truth about the existence of sex slavery. She paints a vivid picture in the reader’s mind of the brothel, where deceitful adults take an unknowing Lakshmi, called the Happiness House. Sold tells the struggles and perseverance of young girls to make the reader consider what life is like for women living in brothels or with pimps and how it affects them after their release or rescue. Having an optimistic outlook can get one far in life, but when considering

Also birth rates and sex are satirised in her novel with the same tactical precision as in the earlier satires. Margaret Atwood uses an indirect style comparable to an allegory to highlight important issues. “I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege.”

The short stories, “Turned”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Good Corn”, by H.E Bates provide strong examples of how the representation of characters influence’s the reader’s perception of a text. Both stories depict similar characters: a middle-aged, childless wife, her husband and an 18-year old girl who works for them. They are both about a similar situation: man cheats on wife with girl and girl falls pregnant. However, the author’s of the text are from very different backgrounds and this is reflected in their stories. Although there are many similarities between “The Good Corn” and “Turned”, the values reflected in these stories, their resolutions and the reader’s perception of them are vastly different due to the contexts of

“Undressing Aunt Frieda,” is a poem about the narrator’s remembrance of his Aunts life while visiting her on a death bed. The narrative is in first person, and takes place as the narrator and his daughter are about to leave the relative. The first half of the poem explores Frieda and her past. The second half is about how the narrator and daughter have grown and learned from the aunt. While undressing her aunt, the narrator feels emotions and remembers his past with Frieda. The poem describes these emotions and memories in a metaphor explaining unique characteristics of how Aunt Frieda undressed, and how she impacted the relatives.

In the detailed story of an impoverished family during the late 1900’s, Jeannette Walls describes her experience from the young age of 3, up until adulthood. The family of 6, with Rex Walls as the father, Rose Mary as the mother, and her three siblings, Lori, Brian and Maureen, were constantly moving throughout the country with little to no food or cash. The memoir shows how dysfunctional the family was, but never seemed to force the reader to condemn the parents. In a life of poverty, the have to move for own to town, and often lived in various mining towns. Although they each found something they learned to love (like Jeannette’s rock collection) in the desert, they had to leave them behind once Rex’s alcoholism only worsened, and they ran

The author, Margaret Atwood demonstrates the theme that in a violent isolated world, feminism is despised by the offended society, the inhuman treatment that women received may lead to physical and psychological perils; conversely, one’s firm belief could embody hope and reveal a precise future. Atwood uses irony to impart the theme. Significantly, the protagonist Offred feels she increasingly losing control of her body as “ an instrument, of pleasure” (Atwood 84). But the infinite emptiness inside her can never swap out the

The lives of Suitcase Lady and Curley’s wife are full with feelings of loneliness and seclusion, eliciting feelings of pity in those who are reading. Curley’s wife lived during a time in which women had little rights and were considered to be the property of their husbands. The men on the farm would not allow her to talk to them as they feared how Curley would react to his wife talking to men other than himself, “I seen ‘em poison before, but I never seen no piece of jailbait worse than her. You leave her be (24).” George’s words perfectly describe the mentality of the men on the ranch towards Curley’s wife, they viewed her as a trap and piece of jailbait simply because she was a woman who wanted to talk to someone. Living on a ranch with only men who refused to acknowledge her because of her marital status was deeply troubling to both Curley’s wife and the readers, “Think I don’t like to talk to somebody ever’ once in a while? Think I like to stick in that house alla time? (55).” Similarly, Suitcase Lady is immensely isolated because comparable to

In addition to the extreme limitations of their daily routine, both characters in MacLeod’s and Gilman’s short stories are subject to their significantly overbearing and oppressive spouses. The domineering management of their lives compels these characters to engage in either reading or writing, as an act of defiance towards their authority wielding partners. This minor form of rebellion allows the characters to feel as though they have at least some aspect of control over their lives. The father in MacLeod’s story is aware of his wife’s aversion to and disapproval of reading; however, this antagonism does not deter him from spending all his minimally free-time devouring books in his room. The narrator notes that his mother “despised the room and all it stood for,” yet his father remained inside it every night while “the goose-necked lamp illuminated the pages in his hands,” in an act of passive-aggressive opposition towards his wife’s

In the words of Sigmund Freud, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” The legendary psychologist saw dreams as an avenue to study one’s underlying motives for action. Similarly, in literature one finds striking significance from the illusions of protagonists that often predict the nature of one’s psyche. Two such examples present themselves in Blanche, from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and the grandmother, from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. The former tale follows a lady without a home who finds herself reliant on her belligerent and bestial brother-in-law. The latter traces a family’s road trip South and their encounter with a wanted fugitive. Both Blanche and the grandmother find themselves tethered to their idealistic and often times hypocritical fantasies which signify their underlying mental instability and foreshadow their eventual ruinations. Williams and O’Connor examine their protagonists’ delusions through gender, clothing, and nostalgia.

Early in their lives, two young sisters, Ruth and Lucille, experience loss and abandonment from the men in the family. Their grandfather had died in a train derailment into Lake Fingerbone before they were born, and their father leaves them while they are very young. Then their mother commits suicide, but not before dropping the girls off on their grandmother’s porch. Moreover, then, “she sailed in Bernice’s Ford from the top of a cliff named Whiskey Rock into the blackest depth of the lake (23), again into Lake Fingerbone. After only a few months their grandmother dies leaving the girls to the remainder of the family, a collection of eccentric females. The girls deal with all of this by relying on each other. Soon, their great Aunt’s,

Two minor characters in this novel also decide to live depressing lifestyles after losing their loved ones. They are Mr. Black in the apartment above Oskar and Ruth Black in the Empire State building. These two feel they cannot function anymore and hid from the world. Mr. Black has not left his apartment in “twenty-four years” because “there hasn’t been any reason too” now that his wife died (162.) He turned off his hearing aids “a long, long time ago…[to] save batteries” (165.) Oskar finds tree stumps in his bed that contain nails representing each day his wife had been dead. The man is over 100 years old and has been through so much in his life. He explains that for most of it he was at ward and “treated [his wife] as though she didn’t matter.” The bed was “the first thing [he] got her when he came back”(161.) As Mr. Black continues to put nails in it and shut the world out, he is always thinking of his wife. He no longer explores or interacts because she is not there.

In many short stories there is a major theme that is shown though literary devices. These themes connect to modern day society and overall have very deep meanings that sometimes have to do with the author's life or experiences.Margaret Atwood uses many literary devices to prove her theme and her motive behind writing her stories. Throughout her stories there are many clues and ideas that spark when reading due to Atwood and her writing. In “Stone Mattress”, Margaret Atwood establishes that revenge may seem right in the beginning of a conflict, but later it causes damage and a sense of emptiness.

Atwood’s work beautifully elaborated the idea of alienation and the need for human communication. She tries to draw the attention of the audience towards the need of a balanced society or a communicating structure for humans. The suffering in her works, especially around the female character, was the result of her experience with the women who generally suffered in some on the other way, she explained. Although she started as a political writer but eventually turned towards writing the novels and poems in order to describe the world around her in words. Atwood’s most celebrated works

The effects of widowhood for Verna Pritchard in the short story by Margret Atwood, Stone Mattress, contained in such a sequence of events; with her insane thoughts, unusual behaviors, and her personal mental health issues, tells me all about this unpredictable widow.