Sheila Birling Analysis

The governess envies other women as she doesn’t have children of her own, due to her profession. Her desire to have children causes her to become obsessive and overprotective of the children. In The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, the role of the governess occupies the liminal space between the expectations of

A girl was not, as I had supposed, simply what I was; it was what I had to become. It was a definition, always touched with emphasis, with reproach and disappointment. Also it was a joke on me(142)”. The main character does not take into account how her mother might want someone to bond with until she is older. Because of her immaturity she has a bad relationship with her parents and her brother even though her thoughts are justifiable.

Jamaica Kincaid’s prose-poem “Girl” is about a mother who tells her daughter how a girl should be and what should she do and act in different cases. Throughout the prose-poem, we see that the love the mother gives is considered as tough love due to her bossy and strict tone, yet the girl deserves to be who she wants to be, have a voice and live her life making her own mistakes. Parents have a huge influence on their kids and even though it is good to have a parent educating you, it can get to a point when it is too much. “This is how you smile to someone you don't like very much; this is how you smile to someone you don't like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely” (Kincaid 1). Psychological speaking, it is unhealthy

The mother yearns for the life she could have had and probably dreams about it every so often, so we created a snapshot of the alternative reality she craves through these photos. *change slide* The purpose of the poem is to challenge the views of motherhood. Gwen Harwood presents the idea that motherhood is anything but glamorous. She shows her audience that being a mother is more than complex and tiring, it is shown in the way she paints the woman as a person constantly making sacrifices for her children, which mentally exhausts her. Throughout the entire poem, she demonstrates the woman’s desire to have a better life and her want for freedom, to be free of responsibilities given to her.

Her lack of the need for love relates to her Person vs. Society conflict of being very boyish when she is supposed to be a proper young lady. Jill Williamson emphasizes this by stating that “Jo is very much of a tomboy, who often wishes in the story that she had been born a boy” (Williamson). As Jo gets older, her sisters press her more and more to be ladylike because the want her to fit in with society, but Jo never truly lets go of her “inner boy.” Meg is only a bit older than Jo and at a glance they may seem

She was treated as if she had a lower social class than the rest of her family. Her step-mother “could not bear the good qualities of this pretty girl, and the less because they made her own daughters appear the more odious.” This jealousy led to taking power over her, overloading her with chores in the house and treating her as an object rather than human. They were so cruel to her, as they even mocked her, with her name originally being “Cinderwench.” She couldn’t tell her father about the cruelties that she dealt with, since if she did, her father “would have rattled her off; for his wife governed him entirely.” When the King’s son invited everyone to his ball, although Cinderella yearned to go, she was not allowed. Instead, she had to help her sisters prepare to attend the ball, When her sisters mentioned Cinderella attending the ball, they shook the topic off by stating “‘it would make the people laugh to see a Cinderwench at a ball.’” They ridiculed the person that helped them to prepare for the event and stayed ignorant to Cinderella’s feelings or wants towards the

The inspector is used to communicate the importance of looking towards a community and the way our actions affect each other. The character is also used to demonstrate the author’s socialist views and opinions, which refer to the injustice towards gender roles and social classes.

In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan shows the discrimination towards her mother’s “broken English” and the impact of the language brought to her. Tan wants to remind us the real function of language is communication by the awkward situation her mother faced but not a sociological tool to evaluate one’s value, which the limitation brought from her mother’s broken English to her revealed. To many people, language was not seen as a form of communication. While people think that language requires every word grammatically correct, Tan shows us that the real function of language is communication which her example of the discrimination her mother faced displayed. For example, she shares about her mother’s “broken English.” When she is saying, “why he don’t send me

Emma and jane Fairfax Jane’s situation in life is much grimmer than Emma’s, and represents the faith of many women at her time. Being an orphan meant that if Jane does not marry, she must become a governess, because she lacks any money of her own. While Emma can afford to practice feminine activities such as drawing, only for the sake of impressing the people surrounding her, and act as coquet to receive male attention, for Jane, attracting a respectable man and marrying him is the only way to have a decent life. Accordingly, she excels in many talents a young lady of those times was supposed to have. Despite being inferior to Emma in social standing, thus not representing a real threat to her social standing, it not surprising Emma takes an immediate dislike towards her.

Throughout our lives, as girls, we have been taught how to act, how to dress, how to act as a “young lady”. In the short story Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, we have seen how the narrator has strong values of how young women should be like and intensely advocates her daughter’s life to be traditional and most importantly gives her advice and warning her from becoming a “slut”. The narrator makes it very clear of how her daughter should act, giving her an endless list in order for her to be looked as a “good girl”. The narrator wants her daughter to be looked as a “good girl” because she wants to protect her by preventing the bad outcomes if she ever turns into a “slut”. The setting in Girl takes place in the West Indies; which has a significant influence of the narrator’s worldviews and values.