Thematic parallel of marriage and family in 'A Secret Sorrow' by Karen van der Zee and 'A Sorrowful Woman' Gail Godwin

A Sorrowful (and now dead) Woman OR The Good (and now dead) Housewife OR The Life and Death of the World’s Best Mom Gail Godwin’s Sorrowful Woman develops the message that the archetypal role of mother and wife is so constricting and limiting as to force ‘the mother’ character to end her life.

In both stories, both woman face a major issue. In Godwin’s story the main female character is suffering depression and always feeling sad and tired from being around her child and taking care of him and her husband. However, Faye in van der Zee’s story is struggling with, her reality of not being able to have children and she’s afraid of marrying her boyfriend, who is madly in love with her, because she’s afraid of disappointing him. Both woman are unsure how to handle their problem and their first instinct is to keep their distance and avoid their issues. Communication also played a huge role in both situations. In “A Secret Sorrow” Kai wouldn’t let Faye just walk away from him without knowing what was wrong and wanted an explanation. That was the main key to their breakthrough. In “A Sorrowful Woman” the husband would just agree with whatever his wife said and would abide by her commands no matter how much it hurt him. If the husband would’ve tried to figure out why she was so sad and sick; things might’ve gone differently.

In both stories both women face a major issue. In Godwin’s story the main female character is suffering depression and always feeling sad and tired from being around her child and taking care of him and her husband. However, Faye in van der Zee’s story is struggling with her reality of not being able to have children and she’s afraid of marrying her boyfriend, who is madly in love with her, because she’s afraid of disappointing him. Both women are unsure how to handle their problem and their first instinct is to keep their distance and avoid their issues. Communication also played a huge role in both situations. In “A Secret Sorrow” Kai wouldn’t let Faye just walk away from him without knowing what was wrong and wanted an explanation. That was the main key for their breakthrough. In “A Sorrowful Woman” the husband would just agree with whatever his wife said and would abide by her commands no matter how much it hurt him. If the husband would’ve tried to figure out why she was so sad and sick; things might’ve gone differently.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.” “We are all equal.” “ No one person is greater than another person.” “Treat others the way you would want to be treated” These are all sayings we have heard in our life, all of those quotes had one thing in common they are all about treating people fairly and not discriminating against other people.Not all human beings are alike matter of fact no human beings are like and I guess some people feel like just because other people aren’t like them they should be treated the way they would. In the texts “The Wife’s story “ by Ursula Leguinn , “I, Too” by Langston hughes , and “Towards a true refugee ” by Suu Kyi each of these stories were created by authors who showed us their viewpoints on tolerance. When

Families, which are basic units of human commit, are constructed from individuals with unique character; these individuals taken as a whole, construct the larger character of the family itself. However, because no individual’s character is perfectly compatible with another’s, there exist inevitable conflict within the family, such as can be expressed as conflict between the self and either another single member or the entire group. Naturally, the rational self will seek to ameliorate such as conflict, perhaps by simply accepting it as a natural part of human life. Other instances, which form the basis of the essay and find roots in essays by Alison Bechdel, Joan Didion, and Richard Rodriguez, occur when such acceptance does not. I strongly suggest that the common response to familial conflict, avoidance, that is, escaping the friction between human characters by refusing on some level to participate in family, introduces a new conflict. While Didion, Bechdel, and Rodriguez, provide textual support to the birth of this second conflict, I shall seek to explain its nature. Born of contrasting characters in family and self, conflict will not be replaced, but bolstered in avoidance. Thus, in acceptance, the self finds resolution.

In both Judy Brady’s “I want a wife” and Rebecca Curtis’s “Twenty Grand,” the reader is given a glimpse into the lives of two families living in different worlds but sharing many similar situations. Both families in the two-story show the environment that they are living in. Through the author’s use of irony, repetition, and tone, it becomes clear that I feel more sympathy for the mother in the story “Twenty Grand”.

In “The Wife’s Story”, the author Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the idea that things aren’t always as they seem. To start the story off, the narrator describes her husband as being “a good husband, a good father” without “any bad in him, not even one mean bone.” This foreshadows that something bad is going to happen. To further explain that a bad event is going to happen, the narrator says, “I don’t believe that it happened. I saw it happen but it isn’t true.” Throughout the whole story, the author misleads the reader to believing the family in the story is human, but the reader later learn that everyone is a wolf. The reader can tell this because the author says, “…her mane high,” and “…the whole pack gathering.” These both give evidence that the characters in the story

Breast cancer can be a very scary experience, not just for the patient, but also for the patient’s family. While patients go through the process of being diagnosed with breast cancer and the treatment that goes with it there are many highs and lows. The themes of

April 30, 2012 Complicated Grief By Hannah Gibbons and LaWanda Trull What is Complicated Grief? Complicated Grief is an intense and long lasting form of grief that takes over a person’s life. Experiencing grief is natural, but complicated grief is a form of grief that takes hold of a person’s mind and will not let go. For most people, grief never completely goes, but over time, healing diminishes the pain of a loss.

In both sections, people have a superficial view of the protagonist’s relationship. The women insist that Mrs. Pontellier’s husband is the best; their views, however, fail to take into account any emotional connection between Mrs. and Mr. Pontellier, instead only taking into account the gifts he gives her that she shares with them. They only view the relationship from a material standpoint. The same rings true of Janie’s relationships. The townspeople envy and support her relationship with Jody, outright ignoring his abuse and treatment of her as an object. They only appear to see the material goods he gives and shares with her, the material goods that they themselves desire but yet do not have. On the other hand, they judge a relationship devoid of that material element, outright critical of her dating Tea Cake, ignoring the deep, emotional connection between the two. Through this, I feel that both authors pull on the idea of people only understanding a relationship form a superficial, materialistic standpoint. It brings out the fact that from the outside, many people fail to take into account any true emotional connection between two people. They fail to examine a relationship from a deeper stance. Such occurrences claimed to occur by these authors can be found consistently. Oftentimes, toxic and abusive relationships are idolized or envied because the people

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In the United States of America, family life has been greatly important to the structure and function of society. A large part of this family life is the institution of marriage itself. Over the past few decades, the role and presence of marriage has been transformed. What once was a standard assumption in the home life of Americans has become increasingly less consistent. The Changing Landscape of Love and Marriage by authors Kathleen E. Hull, Ann Meier, and Timothy Ortyl discusses how and why these changes may have taken place on the basis of two primary conclusions. The first of these is the idea that marriage has lost it’s taken-for-granted status, and the second being the fact that both adults and children are experiencing more upheaval in their personal lives than in the past.

The Wife’s Story Ursula K. Le Guin’s purpose in “The Wife’s Story” is to demonstrate that no one is as open with their secrets as you think they are. She expresses this through characterization and foreshadowing through the narrator’s eyes. By contrasting the husband being a “good husband” and one who “was nice with his family” with him acting unusual by “not wanting to talk about it” and turning into “the hateful one,” Le Guin illustrates the husband acting secretive and not as open as he used to be with his wife. The husband altering to a human represents his secretive behavior, whilst the husband being “purely good” and “a hard worker” represents his more open persona. Likewise, Guin writes in a format that allows the narrator to speak

A Tale of Two Divorces written by Anne Roiphe in 1995, discusses two different situations in which a divorce was necessary. One must agree that marriage between two individuals do not always work out and you are given an ultimatum, but not everyone decides to look both ways. In A

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