In the short story “A Wedding-Dress” the main character is a woman named Lena Schwartz. This woman is excited, because she is about to get married to Sam Hilton. The reader discovers that Miss Schwartz is a people pleaser and that she does not take responsibility for her actions. Lena must learn from the mistakes that she is making before she can be truly happy with her life. Miss Schwartz only thinks about making other people happy, because she is afraid of them becoming angry, or leaving.
“It came into my head that I cannot run away. I am who I am wherever I am”. Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman is about a 14 year old girl who's father, the lord, wants to marry her off to a rich old man with lots of land. Catherine wants to just get away from the lady life and escape, but is always held in place by her pregnant mother, and her always nagging nurse/maid Morwenna. In Catherine, Called Birdy, many women gave Birdy advice but she never really listenened to them, but when she did, she made a decision that changed her life forever.
Explore the ways disturbed characters are presented in Shakeapeare’s Macbeth and Browning’s My Last Duchess, The Laboratory and Porphyria’s Lover. This is essentially a “use of language” essay, you need to show HOW the disturbed natures of the characters are conveyed, not just say how they show themselves. The essential point of this essay is to demonstrate what Shakespeare and Browning DO to convey the disturbed nature of the characters – not just saying what disturbed things the characters say or do, but what poetic and dramatic techniques the authors use to show their distrurbed natures. You MUST use quotations to back up every point you make. If you are hoping for the highest grades (B and above) you must make comparisons between the characters in the poems and Lady Macbeth.
She was a beautiful yet very petite girl, she stood at 4’11’’ and weighed no more than 90 pounds. “Photographs...failed to do justice to her looks.” Bonnie Parker grew up dreaming about having true love and romance like in the movies, which could be the reason why she dropped out of school and rushed into marriage with Roy Thorton at the young age of 16. This marriage did not go as well as she had planned, and Thorton ended up in jail. Parker then moved on to live with her grandmother. Her dream of finding true love appeared to be over, that was until one night at a friend’s house when she was nineteen, she met Clyde Barrows, who was twenty one.
Growing up is often a drawn out process. Although in some cases blossoming into a knowledgeable and self sufficient person may only take on experience, maybe even a sentence or a glace of something different and your whole life and perspective will adjust. The short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates the struggle of life and the decisions people are faced with everyday. We learn early in the story that Connie does not appreciate, nor does Connie like, or have any kind of relationship with her mother, father, or sister. ”Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt’s house and Connie said no, she wasn’t interested, rolling her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it.” Connie obviously puts a wall between her and her family.
Mama notes how nice and wavy the ground looks, intentionally to impress Dee. Reflecting her own thoughts as Maggie’s, she tells how Maggie will be nervous until her sister leaves. Mama says, “she will stand hopelessly in the corners and shamed…She thinks her sister has always held life in the palm of one hand, that no is a word the world would never say to her.” (Walker). Leaving the reader to not know how Maggie really feels about Dee at all. Mama daydreams of meeting on a T.V.
Edie is a fifteen year old girl that did not fare very well in school, so her parents decided to take her out of school after she finished the last in the class. Edie went to for Dr. and Mrs. Pebbles where she took care of the two children and cared for the home and the cooking. The plot is the dynamic element in fiction, a sequence if interrelated, conflicting actions and events that typically build to a climax and bring about a resolution (Clugston, 2010). The plot in “How I Meet My Husband” is how a young innocent farm girl waiting for a gypsy pilot to write her a letter. She never hears from him again but still manages to find love while maturing and learning a life lesson.
Knowledge is not always power because the more you know does not necessarily mean you understand what you have learned. In the short story “Everyday Use”, education seemed to make a rift in the relationship not only between the mother and the daughter, but also between the sisters. Dee was one to always try and outsmart her family members always seeking answers knowing no one knew. It was mama who eventually got the community together to help send Dee to school so her daughter would be happy and satisfied. The values of heritage seem to have been lost with the gain of knowledge when Dee has gone to college.
The narrator in “Eleven” is a small guinea pig who experiences a terrible day on her eleventh birthday at the pet store: her teacher forces her run on a hamster wheel even though she is not a hamster. It was humiliating. However, as the little girl is putting on the sweater she “wishes she had gadgerts and jizmos”. The example proves that the theme in “Eleven” is that people can be cruel for very trivial reasons because the only reason that the teacher and the narrator’s classmates made her put on the sweater was because she was different than her other
Unwanted As a child, O’Neill would go from town to town with her mother who thought she was so intelligent and did not need a job. As she got older, they realized living with relatives was not the best idea and that the best idea was for her to go live with her father in Montreal. In Lullabies for Little Criminals, O’Neill emphasizes the struggles of being an unwanted child using similes, metaphors and conflict. Many similes are used throughout the entire novel; this can be shown through the following quote, “A set of fake nails were lying in [the soap dish], like petals that had fallen off a flower” (O’Neill, 5). This relates back to being an unwanted child, because flowers are beautiful and to Baby these fake nails are probably beautiful.