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Summary Of The Short Story Caged

Decent Essays

Silencing and isolating people has always been, andSilencing and isolating people has always been, and still continues to be a way to conserve normalities in a society. It minimizes the fear that an outsider may change the typical mindset and values a person is brought up to have within a society. In the short story “Caged” by an unknown author, the elders of the village imprisoned Charity for breaking the rules of the village in hopes that the other women of the village could learn from her mistakes and would not follow her footsteps. Charity’s imprisonment failed to be the example that the elder’s were aiming towards. The elders believed that by isolating Charity in a fence away but in view of the other village women would be a lesson …show more content…

With time, the women started to acknowledge Charity less and less to the point that she was merely a woman behind a fence. They no longer considered the reasons of her being in that fence or the punishments that came with Charity breaking the village rules.
For Constance, unlike the other women, it does not take her time to overlook the men’s reasons and lessons for segregating Charity. It was against the elder’s rules for anyone to help Charity and Charity was aware of that as well- “She knew her friend was risking grave punishment just by talking to her” (5). Not only did Constance overlook it from the beginning, but she also continued to secretly provide necessities for Charity and accompany her at times.
The way that Charity is isolated in “Caged” symbolizes how females are silenced in the modern world today so that their ideas do not overpower the standard way of life, often involving male dominance. A lot of the time, it seems as if the isolating and silencing has been successful but that is not the case for many circumstances. As women are silenced, it often leads to ignorance from those that oppose feminism, as shown by both the men and the women in the short story. From Constance, being someone who supports Charity, there is rebellion. This is shown in the outside world as those are support feminism, where there is also rebellion. Ignorance and rebellion are not a sign of success, but are in fact a sign of failure as it also disrupts social norms.

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