¶ … societal expectations play a part in "The Sorrowful Woman."
The protagonist in Gail Godwin's short story "A Sorrowful Woman" demonstrates not only the ways in which people's lives can become compromised and limited by their attempts to meet the expectations of others but also the ways in which we each internalize those expectations. This is the real harm that limiting attitudes like racism and sexism have, as Godwin shows us: Not that other people try to limit what we can accomplish in our lives but that we ourselves also begin to believe that we are not good enough to be, as Dickens so eloquently summarized it, the heroes of our own lives.
The story tells about a woman who has become so used to following the societally determined and enforced rules of conduct for a wife and a mother that she is no longer capable of living in an atmosphere of freedom. She finds that she cannot even write a sonnet -- that emblem of restricted literary forms because she "had choices for the sonnet, ABAB or ABBA for a start. She pondered these possibilities until she tottered into a larger choice: she did not have to write a sonnet. Her poem could be six, eight, ten, thirteen lines, it could be any number of lines, and it did not even have to rhyme."
We see a woman, like the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" who in the end can either conform unhappily to social rules or turn to a self-effacing madness, and who chooses the latter.
3. Examine a static character.
John Updike's "A&P" tells us a tale that we've all heard before, although in such an engaging way that we are quite happy to hear it one more time. The story, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1961, is a coming-of-age story. Updike's story follows a boy's thwarted attempts to impress a girl and how in the end this boy, the narrator Sammy, instead only impresses himself with the difficulty of being an adult. It is at the same time the story of how Sammy comes to recognize his own agency, the fact that he has the ability to set his own course in life. This is a crucial point in each person's life, that moment when we realize that we have become one of the "adults," and while fate can always step in for good or evil we have come to have a significant say in our own affairs.
Because Sammy changes in the story from a childlike character who sees himself as someone that things happen to a more mature character who can affect change, he is an example of a dynamic character.
4. Analyze the title in "A Doll's House."
Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll's House is almost certainly not as shocking to those who read it today as it was when it was first published. In many ways, general public attitudes have caught up with Ibsen's own so that his play now appears to express what many people feel. And yet this must not blind us to the fact that his play was very much ahead of his time in so many ways -- especially, of course -- in the way in which women are depicted. Ibsen uses the gap between appearances and what is real to make us question why reality is the way it is and what we might do to change aspects of the world that we do not like. He asks us to ask ourselves why it is that a woman should be treated like a doll rather than an independent human being who can think for herself. Understanding that the title is both ironic and condemnatory of social practices of the time is the essential key to understanding this powerful play.
5. Discuss how the setting is used in "The Storm."
There are actually two different kinds of setting that Kate Chopin uses in her short story "The Storm," and she uses both to good effect. The first is the storm itself, an example of the power of natural forces that overcome human life and human social conventions: Just as there is no way that people can avoid being drenched by the storm, people (in the form here of Alcee and Calixta) can be overcome by the physical elements of passion. Both storm and passion can be resisted or given in to.
The other essential element of the setting in Chopin's story is the Cajun region of the Southwestern United States, which lends to the characters both an air of exotic-ness and also to their seeming isolation from mainstream American conventions and morality.
6. Examine the symbolism in "The Sick Rose."
William Blake's "The Sick Rose"
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