Writer, Amy Tan, in her narrative essay, “Mother Tongue,” recounts the struggles of growing up in a “broken” english household. Tan’s purpose is to bring to attention the injustices that are put upon individuals that don’t speak English as their first language. She adopts a reflective tone in order to capture the emotions of her readers. Tan sets the stage of her essay by recalling stories that exemplify how her mother has been put down based on how she spoke. She states: “...her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts” (4).
The doll has been passed down from generation to generation in Josephine’s family, and seems to represent the tragedy of each woman’s demise. Josephine’s mother, Manman, is not introduced to readers in good health, but throughout the story the theme of depression is emphasized by the mother’s rapid decline in health and appearance. When Manman is first introduced to readers she is not in good shape. “Her skin barely clung to her bones, falling in layers, flaps, on her face and neck.” Despite her appearance, it seems that she is holding onto some hope. She tells Josephine that the guards “have not treated me badly.” She also describes to her daughter how the food Josephine brings her lasts for many months.
Furthermore, orphans were also often treated with disdain and distrust, due to their reputation as “criminally prone” individuals, and were frequent targets of classic “Victorian contradictions”, that characterized the social conventions of Victorian society. Bessie repeatedly refers to Jane as ‘poor orphan child’ in her hymn early on at Gateshead. The development of Jane’s character is central to the novel. She learns to control her passions, as her integrity is put to the test when she faces so much injustice: ‘why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, forever condemned?’. The bildungs roman of the protagonist, contrasts the attitudes of the mature Jane to her younger self initially shouting: ‘unjust, unjust’, nonetheless coming of age made her reactions and opinions more subtle, ‘what consternation of a soul was mine that dreary afternoon’.
Jane Eyer opens with Jane being wrapped I her own thoughts. We discover that she is living in a house where she is not welcomed. The other kids Eliza, John, and Georgina are kept at a distance by their abrasive mother Mrs. Reed. Mrs. Reed seems to be threatened by Janes level of maturity. It’s almost like she finds it disrespectful.
Autobiography of a Face Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face is narrated by Lucy herself. She faces rejection and the challenge of accepting how her face looks after having many painful surgeries. Later on, after experiencing all her surgeries, Lucy’s attitude about it progressed. Lucy deals with all the negative comments and grows from them. Throughout her childhood, Lucy had to face with children staring at her differently.
The men make her seem like she was a bad person, but in reality she was just lonely. Curley’s wife is the loneliest character in the novel. At the end of the novel you finally understand what Curley’s wife is really like and what she has bottled up inside of her. Curley’s wife is a complex character and it requires some thought to truly understand what kind of a person she is. By the end, it comes to realization that Curley’s wife is dependent, unenthusiastic, and naïve.
Similarly, the sympathy commanded by Jane in Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre' could be initially seen to be due to her vulnerability, and position as a victim within her patriarchal Victorian society. An orphan since childhood, Jane displays constant feelings of being ostracised, exiled and marginalised. She desperately seeks a true sense of community and home, and this desire tempers her equally intense need for “kin”, autonomy, and freedom. While Alex and Jane are presented as fairly different characters, the sympathy they gain from readers, and the techniques utilised to allow this sympathy to be evoked could be considered to be fundamentally similar. One way in which both Brontë and Burgess allow their protagonists to be portrayed as sympathetic is through their use of first person narratives.
She is introduced as a temptress or “looker” but later reveals a deeper character in the novel. Curley’s wife is powerless due to her gender. In the book, women are portrayed as troublemakers and Curley’s wife is defiantly included in this portrayal. She is described as a “tart”, “bitch”, and a “tramp”. The workers speak of her, basically, as Curley’s problem that needs to stay at home away from the other workers.
Besides, 'wringing of hands' and 'ceiling without a star emphasize her concerns to her child and explicit her disappointment towards this horrible world. Disappointment here actually describes a sort of vulnerable status of women in some specific situations relating closely to their children. Furthermore, Plath's Mirror also reveals women's disappointment, but which is different, from aging and her sense of loss. The subject matter, mirror, is personified, symbolising women's constant desire to remain young. .
Schwartz mentioned a good example when “ Jane was infant, who was orphaned by the death of her parents, and how Jane became the ward of a woman who always abused ,then she moved on to explain when Jane was as a little girl , who experienced her circumstances as arbitrary , which were beyond her power to change , also she explains the gap that happened in Jane’s childhood and her adultness and how she represents herself and how that ambiguity run” (549) . Schwartz on her essay went on to apply Derrida’s concepts of deconstruction on one hand like “split” and “the binary oppositions”. As she also investigates Jane’s family name and explains what her name means in Latin, also on this part of her essay on the other hand she go back to Freud big impact on the novel and used his psychological concept which is “the family romance “ that she thoroughly apply it on her essay and how Jane’s narrative embody the double wish in her novel like “original and derived, free and bound, an orphan and an heir” (553). Schwartz said that we have to over look the ambivalent representation of home and family that run throughout the novel (553). She gives a good example “how the ambivalence about home is manifested in the slippage of the family name Eyre” (554) .Also how Rochester and St. John are victimized by the trap that is family and how Jane herself escapes it.