The Day To Herself: Chapter Analysis

In this section, Jeannette Walls starts off, in the present time by telling the readers about her seeing her mom on the street, that she hasn’t seen in a long time. Jeannette uses emotional words like blustering and fretted to show that seeing her mom was an emotional time. Later in the section, she goes way back into her life to when she was three years old and when her family and her was living in the desert. She started off telling a story of when she was on fire. This story was intense, it was really dramatic on her parents part, her dad was screaming at her and the doctor a lot. Then she talked about when they moved to Las Vegas, her family lived in a motel room, which didn’t last long, they had to leave Vegas in a rush, because her dad was cheating in blackjack and the dealer found out. The last story in the section is where her family drove to San Francisco and stayed in another motel. One night her dad was at the bar, across the street. He left Jeannette and her three other siblings in the room. Jeannette got bored so she decided to play with fire and that let to a big disaster resulting in the whole hotel burning down.

In the quote, Woolf is discussing the confidence of women. Since the job of a woman is basically to be inferior to men, women are losing confidence. Women are constantly struggling to do what they want as they require, “gigantic courage and strength”. Wolf believes that men have purposefully made women inferior in order to reinforce their own confidence. Thus, this lack of confidence not only led to lack of quality life for women but also led to a lack of writing. However, even with this lack confidence women continue to persist and do everything they can to write. Woolf believes that if women did have more money and confidence, then they would not have to be so inferior and get married to men so early on. Woolf believes she could have done what she wanted as she would have been financially stable and not be reliant on others. Thus, Woolf could have been the boss of herself with freedom and time. With this freedom and time, Woolf and other women could have had the opportunities to produce the works they wanted to and get it published.

“He [Jeannette’s father, Rex] will not keep me out of harm’s way, he will put me in harm’s way and I have to find a way to remove myself from the situation.” (Diversity Connection). I feel like this quote, from Jeannette, came t directly from the situation where Rex took her out to the bar to help him earn money for alcohol, but yet she still doesn’t see herself as a victim. Even though Jeannette Walls was the victim of sexual abuse at a very young age, she tries to recreate the freedom from her childhood into her adult life, But in her younger years where she has no occupational activities, no nurturing, no money and no friends to turn to, it proves to be very hard to maintain.

After studying women and gender history in early America for the past semester, my views about American history have changed tremendously. Having very little prior experience with history, I had many assumptions and preconceived notions from high school history classes. Women were never even mentioned in my previous learning about U.S. history, so I assumed they took on unimportant roles and had little, if any, impact on shaping our country’s history. However, after this semester of delving deeply into the women of early America, I could not have been more incorrect. Although they were not typically in the public realm, we cannot fully understand history without studying women. The following readings uncovered the roles of women in the private sphere and were crucial to my new understanding of the importance of women in American history by bringing women to the forefront.

The Book of the City of Ladies During the renaissance many different views of leadership surfaced. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, and William Shakespeare’s Richard III each present distinct views of what would make a good leader during the renaissance period. Shakespeare and Christine de Pizan’s views align most closely with Plato’s.

Giving an Account of Oneself, a compelling piece of work written by Judith Butler, digs deep into what it means to give an account of oneself and how it is nearly, if not entirely, impossible to do such an activity without becoming “a social theorist” (Butler 8). Butler states “the story of my origin I tell is not one for which I am accountable, and it cannot establish my accountability,” (Butler 37) since the story is always changing. We are not able to give our accounts as the accounts we give will always be told in different lights and we, as beings, are always changing as the norms around us change. The sense of being ties into us not being the same person we were when we came into being, and nor are we the same being as when we begin to tell the story of our origin of being. However, other notable influences, such as Levinas, believe that fully exposing our origin of being would act as a sort of “surplus” (Levinas 79) meaning those we expose our origin of being to will be so overwhelmed with the situation that we would never be able to give an account of ourselves overall. Levinas’ views coincides with Butlers’ on the topic of norms and how we will never be able to act outside of norms when he states, “the moment I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone… I am, as it were, disposed by the language that I offer” (Levinas 26).

Prior to and throughout the late middle ages, women have been portrayed in literature as vile and corrupt. During this time, Christine de Pizan became a well educated woman and counteracted the previous notions of men’s slander against women. With her literary works, Pizan illustrated to her readers and women that though education they can aspire to be something greater than what is written in history. Through the use of real historical examples, Christine de Pizan’s, The Book of the City of Ladies, acts as a defense against the commonly perceived notions of women as immoral.

able to get rid of. At the end of the poem Sexton admits the thoughts of suicide are something you can never get rid of, “and yet she waits for me, year after year” (line 25). Sexton justifies the reasons for her suicide by saying that her thoughts and bad memories will never stop coming back because this has been happening for years and years now there is no going back for Sexton. She leaves us with the last stanza filled with unfinished things. This could be a metaphor for her life that is unfinished because of her death occurrence.

The novel He, She and It by Marge Piercy takes the reader into the year 2059. The world has been divided into 23 different regions known as multis, which are based on corporate culture. Shira Shipman, the main character, lived in the multi Y-S (Yakamura-Stichen) until her ex-husband was granted the custody of their two year-old son Ari. Shira decides to return back to her hometown of Tikva, where she was raised by her grandmother Malkah. To take her mind off of Ari, she goes to work with Avram, her ex-boyfriend’s dad, on creating an illegal human-like robot named Yod. Yod is designed to protect the town of Tikva. Since it is illegal to create a robot to portray the same features of a human it is Shira’s job is to teach Yod human mannerisms

I chose to do my analysis on the short story, “The Story Of An Hour”. The themes I see in this story is the quest for identity/coming of age, romantic/love, birth, and death. It is about a woman named Mrs. Mallard. She was an elderly lady and had a heart complications. Her sister Josephine and her husband’s friend Richards had to break the news to her that her husband, Brently Mallard, has been killed in a railroad disaster. Mrs. Mallard was sorrowful and sobbed in her sisters’ arms. After her grieving process, she wanted to be alone, so she went to her room and locked herself in. As she sat in the window, she seem to be calmer and accepted her husband’s death. She was not distressed of what had happened. She began to say the words “free” and her heart

Imagine a wife and husband being married for 44 years and having one of them not remember who the other is, or their past life together. The film Away From Her (Egoyan, et al., 2006) shows viewers how the disease can greatly impact your life, and how quickly it can form. The film was based off of a short story “The Bear Came over the Mountain” by Alice Munro (Munro, 2013). In both works, the author and the director portray a significant struggle between a husband and wife dealing with Alzheimer’s.

Eavan Boland’s poem “It’s a Woman’s World” illuminates the fact that history has shaped an unfair role for women in today’s society. Boland criticizes the gender bias with regards to the limitations placed on women and their job choices despite their ability to be just as successful in the workplace as men. Regardless of the fact that the bias against women in the workplace is often overlooked, Boland aims to show the shared reaction of women to the gender bias prevalent in our society by using short sentence fragments, repetition, and a fire motif throughout the poem.

In the story The Washwoman, written by Isaac Singer, the author conveys a sense of selflessness and dedication through several elements. The Washwoman in this story has to fight through several hardships and overcome them. The author tends to use a serious mood to project how you should see the characters throughout this story. Not very many people could have done what the Washwomen did without help. She washed an abundance amount of clothes all while battling old age with declining health.

When first reading Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour," one may not typically be surprised at its ending, write it off as one of those creepy "back from the dead" horror stories and forget about it. There is more to this story than simply horror. The author is making a very strong, however subtle, statement towards humanity and women's rights. Through subtle symbolism, Kate Chopin shows how marriage is more like a confining role of servitude rather than a loving partnership.

The poem “The Mother” written by Gwendolyn Brooks in 1945, is a poem that focuses on the immeasurable losses a woman experiences after having an abortion. The poems free verse style has a mournful tone that captures the vast emotions a mother goes through trying to cope with the choices she has made. The author writes each stanza of the poem using a different style, and point of view, with subtle metaphors to express the speaker’s deep struggle as she copes with her abortions. The poem begins with, “Abortions will not let you forget” (Brooks 1), the first line of the poem uses personification to capture your attention. The title of the poem has the reader’s mindset centered around motherhood, but the author’s expertise with the opening line, immediately shifts your view to the actual theme of the poem. In this first line the speaker is telling you directly, you will never forget having an abortion. Brooks utilizes the speaker of the poem, to convey that this mother is pleading for forgiveness from the children she chose not to have.