The Beggar Maid : Stories Of Flo And Rose

Nowadays, freedom is a fundamental right for each man and woman, but it is not a perfect concept. When one’s freedom is endangered, he can do unimaginable things, especially when love is at stake or can react weirdly when he acquires it. It’s exactly what Kate Chopin, a female American author during the 19th century, did when she treated about women’s conditions in the short-story Story of an Hour in 1894, where a woman falsely learns about his husband’s death. Almost 60 years later, Roald Dahl wrote Lamb To The Slaughter, set in Great Britain, where a woman kills her husband and hide the evidences cleverly. These two short stories are not only comparative on the two female protagonists and the imagery used, but also on the main themes

The play “Poof” by Lynn Nottage is a story that briefly but directly shows the emotions that abused women can go through during their lives. In the story, the main character feelings go from fear, to relief, to freedom, after “magically” making her husband disappear.

“It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder, that life might be long.” (Chopin 17). “"Poof!"… gave a revealing look at the victims of domestic abuse and how they wrestle with overcoming their fear and their doubts after suffering years of abusive treatment.” (Toomer 5) Loureen unlike Mrs. Mallard, witnesses her husband’s death first hand during a marital argument. Loureen goes through denial questioning whether her husband’s death. She is happy her husband is dead but also feels guilty, because she knows how a mourning wife should react, but the joy of his demise is greater,” I should be praying, I should be thinking of the burial, but all that keeps popping into my mind is what will I wear on television when I share my horrible and wonderful story with a studio audience…”, Loureen’s husband, Samuel, was physically abusive, as revealed by Florence, Loureen’s best friend and neighbor. “Did that mother***** hit you again?” (Nottage 1563) This abuse, physical by Samuel and mental by Brently, is what allows Loureen in the drama “Poof!” and Mrs. Mallard in the short story “The Story of an Hour” to have the shared freedom they feel in the release from their respective abusive relationships.

“There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods… but they were about other women, and men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by other. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives” (57).

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.

In Alice Sebold’s novel, The Lovely Bones, the Salmon family learns that their fourteen year old daughter, Susie Salmon, has been raped and murdered. Because of this her father, Jack, sister, Lindsey, and mother, Abigail, all go through their own respective journeys in order to accept this ordeal. During this time of grievance for Susie’s family, her father, Jack, believes that the person responsible for the murder of his daughter is his neighbour, a man named George Harvey, and reports this to detective Len Fenerman. However, Len Fenerman becomes too preoccupied with his affair with Abigail to aid Jack with his suspicions. Meanwhile, Susie’s younger siblings Lindsey and Buckley, try to learn how to cope with the loss of one of their very own, without their parent’s attention to aid them. In The Lovely Bones, Susie’s father, mother, and sister, all explore the theme of grief by going on their own pathways through the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, in order to come to terms with the brutal murder of their beloved Susie.

Have you ever noticed that, many individuals never awaken to reality unless they are exposed to violence? In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” his main character, the grandmother is a master manipulator. In the story, a family is destroyed not only because of accidents caused by the grandmother, but also because the grandmother is inconsiderate and self-centered; they are all killed because they meet a murderer who also is unable to see beyond his own insights and choices. Her manipulative capabilities, her selfish, self-centeredness and her Southern lady nature are all examples of her deceitful role.

In The Paradise of the Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids Melville demonstrates how the oppressive power of the upper class over the working class, molds and kill the social, emotional and physical life of the working class while they benefit from it. Melville depicts how industrialism created an economic separation of classes that although seemed unrelated and contradictory in their different spaces, both sustained each other. The upper class, the bachelors, needed the labor of the lower class to maintain the wealthy life they had and the lower class, the maids, survived with the small wages gained with their labor. In order for the upper class to continuously enjoy their privilege, they had to exploit in any way possible the working class.

How many women and young girls have experienced any form of harassment in their lives either if they innocently provocated it or not? As a matter of fact, we often hear on the news issues that happend, most of the time, to women such as sexual harassment or kidnapping. In Joyce Carol Oates's ''Where are you going, Where have you been?'', innocence comes with serious harassment consequences. This is shown through character, symbol and dialogue.

Jacobs’ narrative is open and honest in its depiction of sexual harassment, describing the nature of the abuse and the tortured emotional state it leaves its victims in. Though the narrative tells of a girl’s life over one hundred and fifty years ago, it remains timely in its reminder that many suffering women do not have the ability to safely end the harassment they face every day, and yet, they continue to endure the consequential

There was a time when society did not consider men and women as equal. Men were considered as the superior human being and the dominant figures of authority in the house while the woman had to be a subservient. Alice Munro uses some interesting details in “Boys and Girls” to hold the readers captive. She takes us on a journey in an era where the male child was deemed more important than the female child. “Boys and Girls is a story about a girl’s struggle in accepting the role society has forced upon her in such a vivid manner that it draws the reader to want to know what happens next. In “Telling Tails,” by Tim O’Brien, he illustrates what a good story should be by using story examples. O’Brien believes that “Boys and Girls” is good story because the author uses a well-imagined plot, striking and dramatic elements, and the ability to reach deep into the heart of readers.

In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, Louise Mallard is caught in a cold marriage and a constrictive house. The same goes for Sarah Penn in Mary Wilkins Freeman “The Revolt of “Mother.’” Despite the fact that both stories share the topics of imprisonment and control, physically and inwardly, the ladies in the stories have diverse responses to their circumstances. Sarah battles the confinements without holding back, taking her opportunity, while Mrs. Mallard adopts a motionless strategy and is just liberated through the death of Mr. Mallard.

Patricia Lockwood’s The Rape Joke is a risky composition- not because it discloses information about Lockwood’s personal rape experience, but because it does so from a comedic stance, ridiculing the unfortunate event and the events leading up to and after it. While the creation of the poem was prompted due to the sexual assault she experienced, the content and subject are not centered around the incident or the assaulter but around rape culture and the sociological concept of victim blaming, from both society and oneself. There is no such thing as a rape joke-the joke is the incredulous ways society has guided people to respond to it.

These two stories exemplify the epitome of women’s repression in the male-dominated society of the late nineteenth century by conveying the feelings of

Blin’s work throughout this article does not just develop into discussing the short story itself, but mainly focuses on the notation of the authors writing. This article, “Alice Munro’s naughty coordinators in Friend of My Youth” by Lynn Blin is an interesting read; by being able to use this article as a template for any other piece of writing while still being very useful and specific towards “Friend of My Youth”. She breaks down the sentences and words to understand the deeper workings of “Friend of My Youth”. Blin points out that Munro purposely leaves important information out of her story, leaving the narrator and the reader in the dark. “It is in… gaps that Munro not only enables us to play our role of active readers by inviting us to fill them in, it is in these gaps she constructs the space in her text to enable various narrative voices to be heard” (paragraph 71). By identifying those blanks the reader can come up with assumptions of what is really happening and thus can come up with a variety of outcomes.