Mrs. York reflects her husband’s appearance with her own chaste look. She keeps her head down and shows very little signs of liberation or poise. Her dresses are weathered as well, and she owns one coat for the winter. She is a devoted wife and mother. Always behind her are her three children who are all back to back in age, and although Mr. York is somewhere in his fifties, Mrs. York is twenty years his junior.
In her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor shares the tragic experience of a grandmother and her son’s family during their trip to Florida. Although her son, Bailey, and his family act coldly and disrespectfully towards her, the grandmother maintains a positive, cheerful attitude and loves them all. When they stop by Red Sammy’s barbeque during the trip, she reflects on the golden years of the past when people would respect each other and trust in one another’s goodness (O’Connor 501). As the family continues their trip, the grandmother recalls a planation in the area that she visited as a young lady and influences the children to convince their father to take them to the house (O’Connor 502). As the family travels down the wooded, unpaved trail, the grandmother suddenly recalls that the plantation is actually in Tennessee. In her embarrassment, she accidently frees her cat from its cage and it causes her son to wreck (O’Connor 503). Then, a car filled with three armed men slowly approaches them. As the men inspect the scene, the grandmother recognizes that the leader is the Misfit, a criminal on the loose. As the other two men take the rest of the family in the woods to kill them, the grandmother tries to appeal to what remained of the man’s integrity and capacity to
Mama, a “big boned woman with rough, man-working hands,” awaits her daughter’s (Dee) return in the literary piece Everyday Use (70). When returning home, Dee’s only mission was to ask for two specific quilts with hopes of hanging her heritage on display. Ordinarily Maggie, Dee’s sister, was once a bright, generous, young girl with abundant potential. Explicitly, one day, Maggie was damaged significantly in a fire in which transformed her entire life. The fire turned a once intelligent, social undeveloped girl into a terrified, hopeless juvenile, along with the failed assistance of her family.
Truman Capote writes “ Deal me out baby, ‘ Dick said. ‘I’m a normal.’ And Dick meant what he said. He thought of himself as balanced, as sane as anyone - maybe a bit smarter than the average fellow, that’s all. But Perry - there was, in Dick’s opinion, ‘something wrong’ with Little Perry.” (Page 108) In this quote, Dick uses Perry to hinder his own self- image. However, he often censures him for more irregular, and childish traits in comparison with which Dick considers himself to be normal. However, each man looks to one another for an oath of his own maturity. Capote uses a relating unrefined to when Dick and Perry talks in the book.
How can a righteous lady and a vindictive woman both be drawn to the same man? Better said, how can one man be involved with such different women? Apparently, these mysteries will forever remain unsolved. However, Arthur Miller surely knows how to deal with this controversy in his play The Crucible, through the characters of Elizabeth and Abigail. These completely opposite women serve as foils for each other since the differences between them help highlight their individual persona. John Proctor represents the connection between these two women. Thus, he is Elizabeth’s husband but has an affair with Abigail. This fact immediately opens the reader’s eyes towards how one’s flaws or mistakes can reveal other person’s qualities and virtues.
Katherine Mansfield wrote about an aged woman, Miss Brill who is isolated from the real world. Miss Brill attempts to build a fantasy life to protect herself from the harsh facts of her existence. The short story “Miss Brill” is very descriptive and has decent examples of imagery to help readers better understand and see what is happening. Robert Peltier mentioned that “Miss Brill” has a rise and fall in each paragraph, so in his overview of “Miss Brill”, he also “chose the rise and fall of every paragraph to fit her, and fit her on that day at that moment” (Peltier), to help readers picture what is happening. The character Miss Brill does not look past what is present, which causes her to be narrow minded and not understand why things happen
Authors, especially female authors, have long used their writing to emphasize and analyze the feminist issues that characterize society, both in the past and the present. Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Susan Glaspell wrote narratives that best examined feminist movements through the unreliable minds of their characters. In all three stories, “The Story of an Hour”, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and “A Jury of Her Peers”, the authors use characterization, symbolism, and foreshadowing to describe the characters’ apparent psychosis or unreasonable behavior to shed light on the social issues that characterized the late 19th century and early 20th century.
In the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” written by Flannery O’Connor, the grandmother influences her family to take a detour on a trip to Florida to see a plantation in Georgia. This maneuver leads them down a dangerous road ending in a car accident. The “Misfit” and his partners appear after the accident and murder the entire family. The grandmother’s self-serving character defines this story: by manipulating everyone who becomes in her path, her air of superiority and judgmental approach.
Jeannette’s family never had enough money to buy themselves a decent house, so they lived out of rugged shacks, old abandoned buildings, and even out in the desert without any form of shelter. The author would describe each new house that her family moved into in such a way that it would persuade the reader to have such strong feelings of hatred towards Jeannette’s mother and father. Neither Mr. Walls, nor Mrs. Walls could keep a job for any decent amount of time, so after living in a house for a little, the family would get behind on the payments and have to pack their things and move on to a new place. The most memorable example of these terrible houses is the house that the family bought in Welch West Virginia. On page 153, “We called the kitchen the loose-juice room, because on the rare occasion that we had paid the electricity bill and had power, we’d get a wicked electric shock if we touched any damp or metallic surface in the room.” This house had a precarious foundation, a leaking ceiling that turned into a deluge of water during even the lightest rains, no source of heat or air conditioning, thousands of bugs, and even filthy rodents. It was a house that would definitely not be suitable for raising four kids if the child protective service had made a visit. The author effortlessly made the reader feel how awful it was to live in Welch by describing her own hatred for
The night before their planned departure, Charity went out onto the front porch to smoke her grandmother‘s pipe, which she had grown quite accustomed to. She sat out there with Mrs. Finley and had a long conversation, going so far as to invite her to travel with them, but Mrs. Finley said that her place was there, where her life
The protagonists of both Erik Larson’s the Devil in the White City and Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams share similar experiences despite being located in different parts of the country.
Comparing the novel Emma and its movie adaptation a striking difference is noticeable. Although most characters are maintained in the adaptation Jane Fairfax is left out. Jane Fairfax is a woman about the age of Emma, who passed most of her life in the company of Colonel Campbell (a friend of her father’s), his wife and his daughter. Colonel Campbell is described as a respectable man who decided to take care of the little girl after the death of her parents. Janes nearest of kin were her grandmother and her aunt, both of them lived a humble life and hardly had a sufficient income. Her aunt Miss Bates was a very popular and always welcomed person, although she was “neither young, handsome, rich nor married” (cf. Emma p.22). She cares for her mother, Jane’s grandmother, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury and together they live in a small and simple home.
Another day was so much like the one before, and the many before that. He walked the house and grounds, slowly, letting time pass as it must. Alone, present but not present, for can one truly be there if no one knows of it? Like the saying he’d heard more than once over the unmeasured time of his existence: If a tree falls in the forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? He ambled through the back yard, pausing under the tree from which he’d been hanged, cursing his tormentors, vowing to haunt them for all time. But it was he who was cursed, trapped here for eternity.
The happy fun-filled day suddenly turned dark with worry (Bates 24). Heather Whitestone was just a little girl when she became deaf, no one, not even herself, knew that was going to happen. No one ever knows when something bad is going to happen in their life or someone else’s. For every disability, there are, disability details, how a person is connected to the disability, how a disability affects someone’s daily life, how that person either got over their disability or was cured from said disability, who influenced someone to overcome their disability, and finally how someone brought attention to the disability. Heather Whitestone won Miss America even though she was deaf. Just because someone has a disability does not mean they can’t do
“For the only thing she had lost to Miriam was her identity, but now she knew she had found again the person who lived in this room, who cooked her own meals, who owned a canary, who was someone she could trust and believe in: Mrs. H. T. Miller” (Capote).