Maria Concepcion Analysis

“Maria Concepcion”, a short story, by Katherine Anne Porter, discussed how much power a community has over people and how the community will protect or reject a person for the sake of the community as a whole as they allowed Maria Concepcion get away with the murder of her husband’s mistress, Maria Rosa. The reason being is due to the fact that Maria Concepcion is well respected amongst the village due to her accomplishments, but they also suspect that she is too prideful. Maria is a very religious and energetic woman who lives by her Christian faith and her duties as a wife to her husband, Juan. This story takes place in Mexico in a village during a time where people lived in huts and women did not know how to read. The duration of the story

For example, Maria Concepcion walked everywhere and she would deliver her husband and his patron lunch at the trenches; when she had delivered the lunches, she pitied Givens because he did not have a woman to cook and care for him. Without that piece represented in the story, we would not know that this society operated using gender roles. Maria Concepcion would make sure she completed all of her duties as a wife and Christian woman. This is similar to Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”, because we deciphered the details of the setting and the actions the character does to find out things about him that we would not have found if we read the story at face value. Also, the interactions between characters in “Maria Concepcion” are quite similar to those in “Everyday Values”, except for the fact that in “Everyday Values” we do not know how the other characters feel about each interaction. In “Maria Concepcion”, the narrator gave us some insight about how each character felt about a certain situation that had arisen. The elements of setting, characterization, and point of view help us further understand the type of woman Maria Concepcion is and how others view