In her story, The Awakening, the protaginist, Edna Pontellier is an unsure housewife with different opinions on her life and the other lives around her. She has to struggle to restore the falling relationships around her with her friends, children and also her husband. Contray to what is usual, Edna is almost against the fact that she must remain loyal to her family and duties of wife and mother and respected women in society. 3rd N: In Colleen McElroys, The Princess, multiple fairy tale women are chosen to reflect different types of meanings. In the poem, the tone changes from hope to despare.
Hope Edelman looks at the realities of marriage and imbalanced parenting roles in her article "The Myth of Co-Parenting." She writes about the common belief that couples have when going into a marriage: things will be perfect. Edelman uses her own marriage to reveal the unexpected difficulties that married couples experience when trying to share responsibilities of working and raising a family. She explains that even though many females feel liberated and inspired to be independent from their husbands, often times these women still end up doing most of the domestic work. Edelman shows how embedded gendered work is in our society, even among feminists.
These stories, "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen and "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin both depict women who carry a lot of emotion from the beginning to the end of the story. They all react to a time when women in their day should not act in the way that they reacted. The carry the stigma that women is to be obedient to their husbands, or their father if they were unmarried. Nora and Mrs. Mallard reacted to their separate situations in a rational, but independent choice; even if society seemed to disapprove of the way they lived their lives. In the story, “A Doll’s House”, we have Nora living with a secret and trying not to let her husband, Torvald Helmer know.
In the film Real Women Have Curves Latina teenager Ana Garcia struggles on trying to balance her family’s culture and her own beliefs that seem to differ very much from her family’s. This becomes a problem throughout the movie. Her family wants her to be doing something that she is not nearly interested in. The problems mainly break through with Ana’s mother whose name is Carmen. Throughout the whole film you are able to see how the culture differences between Ana and her mother Carmen affect their mother and daughter relationship even till the last moments of the film.
Sommers is a static character. In the beginning, she is a caring and loving mother. During the climax, her id conquers her superego and she becomes self-centered, but at the end of the story, she is back to where she was, being a devoted mother and wife to her family. Mrs. Sommers represents a woman who has been oppressed by the world of marriage. She is forced to fit in the social norm of being a proper mother and ‘woman’ that she has no time to explore her individuality because she lives in a patriarchal society.
Daughters would grow up and potentially help the family through an advantageous marriage. Hence-forth, wives took care of the home to help in the farm and bore children to carry on the family’s name. It is evident that despite what class a woman is from they all had similar destiny of becoming housewives. However, those among the elite were highly regulated to ensure chastity before marriage to have legitimate heirs. Moreover, if a woman did not marry she would not be permitted to live independently.
She wants to return to her virtuousness self and have a source of strength and inspiration. “Theme” Coming of Age Like many other books on memoirs and coming of age, “Almost A Woman” moves along the common thematic lines like parent-child conflicts, sibling rivalries, the path to adulthood, friendships, relationships with the opposite sex, and social issues. It is evident that the transition in coming of age is not easy because of the many challenges Negi and her family faced. For instance, as she comes of age, Esmeralda Santiago takes over the life multi-roles of student, daughter, and interpreter for her family. She lacks the ability to speak good English, her family is poor, and she is alienated because she comes from a different culture.
Depending on the category, a woman can be treated quite differently throughout her adulthood. Ana Castillo’s So Far From God battles and reconfigures these gender roles by writing the life stories of these Chicanas. Individually, Sofi and her daughters, La Loca, Caridad, and Esperanza, decolonize themselves from both the three roles in which society has categorized them and their overall oppression. It is through their close relationships between the women in their lives that they can transform into a kinship of comadres that support and assist each other to resist any hetero-patriarchal forms of oppression. Unfortunately, not all of Sofi’s daughters try to break away from this society.
* I am going to compare the themes of two short stories, “I Stand Here Ironing” and “Everyday Use”. “I Stand Here Ironing” is written in a participating narrator point of view. Her theme is a basis of motherhood. She claims as though the position of a mother and how society expects to be is truly just a discovery of how to overcome obstacles. It also focuses on the points of guilt and regret in her life as a mother and how she feels that there is guiltiness within her because of the absence she has made within her daughters’ life.
Amy Tan's short story "Two Kinds" focuses on multiple themes in the relationship between a Chinese mother and her Americanized daughter who in turn assumes she must reject her mother in order to find her sense of self, coupled with trying to assimilate into American society. The main character and narrator is Jing-Mei who is also the protagonist of the story. As well as her mother Mrs. Woo who is portrayed as the antagonist, and is always urging Jing-Mei to try new things and discover new talents. Jing-Mei's mother believes that with a little hard work her daughter can be anything she wants to be in America and is determined to make Jing-Mei a child prodigy but we have to question Mrs. Woo’s ways and ask ourselves; do the ends truly justify the terrible means?