What Is Lust By Susan Minot

In “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet is inundated in indecision and internal struggles over the virtues and shortfalls of her abilities and the book that she produced. As human beings we associate and sympathize with each other through similar experiences. It is difficult to sympathize with someone when you don’t know where they are coming from and don’t know what they are dealing with. Similar experiences and common bonds are what allow us to extend our sincere appreciation and understanding for another human being’s situation. In this poem an elaborate struggle between pride and shame manifests itself through an extended metaphor in which she equates her book to her own child.

Atwood displays her feelings about not only the art of creative writing, but also the equally artistic act of living one's life to the

Charlotte rejects her mother’s ideology from a young age, and has the perspective to see past the illusions of perfection her mother creates, and Miss. Hancock gives her the weapons to fight her mother. In seventh grade, Miss. Hancock teaches Charlotte about the metaphor, sparking the creativity within Charlotte her mother shunned. The metaphor becomes a symbol throughout the short story, but it also develops into something deeper. The metaphor becomes an allegory of Charlotte 's rebellion against her mother’s influence, and her future. Writing is an outlet, an opportunity for Charlotte to express and understand herself. The form of expression was a gift from Miss. Hancock, who arms her with the power of creativity. “‘My home,’ I said aloud, ‘is a box It is cool and quiet and empty and uninteresting. Nobody lives in the box,” Charlotte says in seventh grade. She has a complex understanding of herself, and is able to articulate her frustrations through metaphors. After graduating out of Miss. Hancock’s seventh grade class, the story picks up introducing the reader to Charlotte as a

Lust is having a self-indulgent sexual desire. Susan Minot portrayed the mind of a promiscuous high school female perfectly. Lust is powerful and seductive, but it's inherently selfish and opposed to love. For many girls who are having sex with different boys they can identify with the desire to be needed. The characters in "Lust" are written in a way to highlight the dysfunction and disconnection of everyone involved. The narrator herself is nameless and faceless, making the reader believe that she has already somehow disappeared, just as the men in her life have made her disappear after having sex. Similarly, the men are listed in a brief and are identified only by their sexual acts or by other, easily objectified characteristics. What

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.

Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, in 1953. In 1970, Tan majored in English at San Jose State, in California. Tan began a carrier as a technical writer after she graduated, at the University of California. However, she changed her writing because she was inspired to write fiction book after reading of Louise Erdrich's novel “Love Medicine”. As a result of this, language has helped Amy Tan in becoming the successful writer she’s today. It helped her express her complete thoughts in a way that everyone who reads, understand. Additionally, the type of language that she uses in her writing makes people take her seriously and as important as everyone else.

In the opening line of “The Author to Her Book”, Bradstreet makes use of a metaphor, in which the “ill-form offspring” (1) emblematizes her book, “The Tenth Muse”, and to create a mother-child relationship between her and the book. The child metaphor allows readers to know that she is not satisfied with her writing skills, but has a devotional bond with it. She points out that her book should never be read by a literature expert due to the wide amount of errors that can be found in her work “made in raggs” (5). She expresses she “wash´d thy face” (13), trying to improve her work, but fails to observe any changes in it and fails in the process. These serve as examples to expose how Puritan women underrated and depreciated their skills, making Puritan community believe that they are inferior to

Woolf shares an anecdote telling “[her] story—a simple one” (1). By sharing about herself, Woolf reveals how she became a journalist through imagery. Describing in detail the process of writing, her payment for her work, as well the hardships she has to face for being a woman. Woolf then asks the reader, “What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits.” (2). The purpose of this

Bausch, Richard and Cassill, Ronald Verlin. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Print.

“Lust,” describes a young teenage girl who has mischievous meetings with many boys. The narrator, which is the young girl, attends Casey Academy which is a coed school. She is sexually active and does not fear pregnancy because she has been taking birth control pills since she was a young girl. The narrator describes her sexual expected gathering with the fifteen different boys she has been with, and when she talks about them she seems emotionally removed from the experience. The narrator’s parents don’t have a clue about what she has been getting herself into: “My parents had no idea. Parents never really know what’s going on, especially when you’re away at school most of the time. If she met them, my mother might say, “Oliver seems nice” or “I like that one” without much of an opinion...” (1029). The narrator’s parents do not show much interest in her life which can be a reason to why she craves

"They turn casually to look at you, distracted, and get a mild distracted surprise, you're gone. Their blank look tells you that the girl they were fucking is not there anymore. You seem to have disappeared.(pg.263)" In Minot's story Lust you are play by play given the sequential events of a fifteen year old girls sex life. As portrayed by her thoughts after sex in this passage the girl is overly casual about the act of sex and years ahead of her time in her awareness of her actions. Minot's unique way of revealing to the reader the wild excursions done by this young promiscuous adolescent proves that she devalues the sacred act of sex. Furthermore, the manner in which the author illustrates to the reader these acts symbolizes the

Martha has gone to multiple colleges, therefore to enhance her writing abilities. She acquired her Bachelors Degree and Masters Degree from the University of Maryland. At the University of Iowa, she attended the writer’s workshop, as well as studied poetry. Martha has teaching experience. She is an instructor of English at the University of Iowa, and an assistant professor of English at Frostburg State College. For fourteen years, she taught at Montgomery College, and spoke at at a seminar about detective fiction at John Hopkins University.

Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.

“If stories were depopulated, the plots would disappear because characters and plots are interrelated” (76). I chose to do my analysis paper over the short story Lust by Susan Minot, in this analysis I will be going over how the use of characterization in lust contributes to the message about relationships. The first-person narrator starts off by detailing her sex life likes it’s a grocery list or some kinds of list of things to do on the weekend. It just goes to show how meaningless these relationship with her sex companions mean. Although we do not know what the reader looks like we do how she thinks and feels. We can feel the narrator become more detached and emotionless towards the end of the story. Even though she is emotionally removed for the story at the end she also becomes more self-aware of what she is doing, and comes to the realization that she is looking for a relationship in all the wrong places.

When saying that there are certain folk or fairy tales about herself, Jeanette Winterson could not be more right, because there are indeed several myths surrounding her person. For many people Winterson's sexuality is the golden key to her public persona. Although she correctly states that `[she is] a writer who happens to like women, [and] not a lesbian who happens to write' most critics are only too willing to interpret her writing in an autobiographical way and restrict her to the literary persona of a lesbian writer only. However, this whole obsession about her sexuality is not the only myth surrounding her. Furthermore, critical opinion likes to describe her as a novelist who feels the constant need to defend her writing against the