Samantha Rodriguez's ENG 400 Blog

      The short story "Use" by Alice Walker describes the story of a family that is torn apart. It feels like they are bound together due to their blood relation and the fire that burned their house down many years ago. The mother in the story's daughter, Dee, is held to a higher standard than her sister, Maggie for the majority of the story. Dee is unattainable, and yet at the end of the story, the mother denies her the grandmother's quilts. It seems like Dee has always been ashamed of her culture, but when she comes back to visit the family, she's using her culture as a novelty. It's sort of like a toy. She changes her name and wants to hang up the old quilts for show. I think the mother didn't give into Dee's wishes this time because she sees that her culture is for show, as opposed to her actually experiencing her culture like Maggie.

       "The Lesson" is written from the perspective of Sylvia on a field trip with a group of kids from the neighborhood and Miss Moore. Miss Moore is described as having "proper speech and no makeup." She doesn't fit the stereotypical, racist view of a black woman at the time. The story was published in 1972 but is written in the past tense. America is still going through troubles with racial equality, so the time period is really important. Miss Moore brings the kids to FAO Schwartz on Fifth Avenue. The kids are very different from the "white folks" in the city, who wear fur coats while it's still hot.       While bringing the children to Fifth Avenue to prove a point about wage inequality, Sylvia gets really defensive. Her friend, Sugar, tries to participate but Sylvia steps on her foot, trying to stop her from talking about America not being much of a democracy due to some people having a lot and others, like the children and their families, d...

      "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway is about a girl's decision to get an abortion. The audience knows the man's view on it as the story goes on, he wants her to get it so they can be free from the burden of a baby. The girl, Jig, wants the baby and feels like she will be handed the world if she goes through with having it.     The setting of the short story reveals a lot about the woman's point of view of having an abortion. The girl keeps looking out to the hills of Ebro, which are white and long, indicating a beautiful pure life awaiting her across the horizon if she has her baby. She looks out to the hills throughout the story, showing that she is longing to go out there and have a more fulfilling life. She looks out to the hills and says, "we can have all this... And we could have everything." However, they're underneath the shade and far away from the hills. After she says they could have everything she says, "and everyda...

      As I worked on my essay last week, the idea of freedom was interesting to me. The women who lived in the 1800s were trapped in their marriages. They couldn't divorce and they couldn't go off on their own due to the social restraints at the time. Thinking about Mrs. Mallard's reaction to her husband's death, it makes sense why she was so happy. It might have seemed like a shock to men reading the story, but for women, I believe it was a piece of escapism. Mrs. Mallard's sentiments about being on her own and living for herself most likely appealed to a lot of women in her same position. Perhaps many women before had looked out a window much like Mrs. Mallard's and longed for the rush of liberation that being on their own would bring. The Story of An Hour shows how restricting patriarchy really is, where the only outcome you can look forward to is death.

    Society's expectations of women being weak and needing a man to survive have been perpetuated for centuries. Chopin's "The Story of An Hour" gives a perspective that not many people in the 1890s would get to see in the public eye, a woman's. The description of Mrs. Mallard and her reaction to her husband's supposed death displays the expectations that have been placed on her throughout her life and how much they have weighed on her.     The connection between the body and the soul throughout the story has obvious and subtle appearances. The more obvious ones are when she feels that she is "pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach her soul" after she is told that her husband died. The physical exhaustion she feels is actually an emotional one. The overwhelming emotions she feels from hearing the news, and also the physical manifestation of the expectations that have been placed on her as a woman in the modern...