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The decline of traditional family
Traditional and contemporary families
The importance of traditional families
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It is not only widowers taking care of their daughters, in Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, Matthew is a father-like figure. The family is definitely unconventional with siblings, Matthew and Marilla, raising an orphan girl, but the two adults do still have their own impact on Anne that affects her childhood. Matthew is set up to be the mild mannered sibling from the beginning; all social interaction making him feel out of place (Montgomery 4). He is the quiet one in the house, who does not have much space to express many words. His sister is the ruler of the household; her’s is the final word. Matthew often is the one to nudge her into being more flexible. It was through his quiet, non-confrontational personality that he was able …show more content…
The Woodlawn family are American pioneers, successfully chasing after their dream and living in a fairly new town in Wisconsin. Caddie is closest with her father, John, who was given the unusual opportunity to raise one of his daughters; a story which he tells to explain her behavior. He is proud that his methodology worked and Caddie survived because he “would rather see her learn to plow […] if she can get her health by doing so” (Brink 15). John saw that there was a problem with the health of his daughters, which, as a result, some died. Instead of forcing the continuation of convention, he decided that he would rather make sure Caddie lived over being seen as proper to outside people, never regretting his decision. The two have a bond that he does not share with his other children as he took such a vested interest in, and is credited with, helping to save her, which gives them a special connection to each other. John takes full responsibility for Caddie’s actions. In fact, he takes a certain pride because she is still alive to be getting into her scrapes. However, a deal between the parents, similar to that between Matthew and Marilla, left the mother to punish and the father to nurture. The biggest disagreement that Caddie has with her mother results with her in the bedroom set on running away. Her father visits her that night to console his daughter, sensing that she wanted some comfort. John quietly and soothingly without asking Caddie to change her position reminds her of their closeness, how she is his little girl, the one that was allowed to run free. John is trying to broaden Caddie’s perspective that Caddie without ever claiming that her fears are unfounded. He simply reminds her that she can be so much more, she is not going to become what she hates. John smartly brings up and
... treats Piney as her own child, and is moved with the couples love. After ten days of living in the cabin, she died from starvation. She requested to Oakhurst to give the rations she has been saving to Piney. He felt all them were already hopeless, so he ordered Tom to hike to Poker Flat and try to get some help. After a couple of days, when the help arrived in the cabin, the found two women huddled together, frozen to death, and close by Oakhurst was found with a gun near him, a bullet right through his heart, and a suicide note saying “Beneath this tree, Lies the body of John Oakhurst, who struck a streak of bad luck on the twenty third of November, 1850, and handed in his checks on the seventh of December, 1850.” (Harte 458). This story shows that people can change their life when they want to, and that anyone can develop feeling despite whatever they did before.
The Jump-Off Creek introduces the reader to the unforgiving Blue Mountains and the harsh pioneer lifestyle with the tale of Lydia Sanderson, a widow who moves west from Pennsylvania to take up residence in a rundown homestead. She and other characters battle nature, finances, and even each other on occasion in a fight for survival in the harsh Oregon wilderness. Although the story is vividly expressed through the use of precise detail and 1800s slang, it failed to give me a reason to care because the characters are depicted as emotionally inhibited.
As a result, their lives changed, for better or for worse. They were inexperienced, and therefore made many mistakes, which made their life in Chicago very worrisome. However, their ideology and strong belief in determination and hard work kept them alive. In a land swarming with predators, this family of delicate prey found their place and made the best of it, despite the fact that America, a somewhat disarranged and hazardous jungle, was not the wholesome promise-land they had predicted it to be.
It all began with three beautiful daughters tested to the extent of how much they loved their father. Three beautiful daughters in competition with one another. Three beautiful daughters with no real winner. The novel, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, is an adaption of the play King Lear by William Shakespeare. These literary works differ greatly from each other. However, both establish a certain type of dynamic within the family. Smiley’s adaptation features a similar patriarchal household to the one that is present in Shakespeare’s when showcasing the relationship with a father and daughter, and by expanding on this idea, she creates a new, separate work.
In Home Jack Boughton 's story from the perspective a sister, Glory who has reluctantly come back to Gilead at 38 years old to watch over her diminishing father, a Presbyterian minister and John Ames ' closest companion. Jack, the family 's odd one out, a drunkard with a shameful past, returns for reasons that he will just cozy they are all the more completely uncovered in Gilead. Glory’s has privileged insights she could call her own: a man to whom she thought she was in love with, yet who ended up leaving mortified her. In Gilead, know Jack 's mystery yet not to his family this obliquity is essential to a tale about the limits of information, and how that impediment decides our judgments of others. In Gilead Ames watches that Jack dependably
After five years of being raised and living with their grandmother whom they truly loved, the girls had a rude awakening. Their grandmother, Sylvia had passed away. “When after almost five years, my grandmother one winter morning eschewed awakening, Lily and Nona were fetched from Spokane and took up housekeeping in Fingerbone, just as my grandmother had wished” (Robinson 29). This was the final attempt that their grandmother had made in order for the girls to have a normal and traditional life. This is a solid example of how the sister’s lives are shaped by their family and their surroundings. Lucille’s ultimate concern in life is to conform to society and live a traditional life. She wishes to have a normal family and is sorrowful for all of the losses that she has experienced such as her mother’s and grandmother’s deaths. On the other hand, Ruthie, after spending more time with her future guardian, Aunt Sylvie, becomes quite the transient like her.
Once upon a time, there was a normal family who lived in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas. They were the image of the perfect family. The father, Mr. Clutter was “the community 's most widely known citizen, prominent both there and in Garden City” and “He was currently chairman of the Kansas Conference of Farm Organizations, and his name was everywhere respectfully recognized among Midwestern agriculturists, as it was in certain Washington offices.” (In cold blood, p. 6). His two younger children, Nancy and Kenyon clutter were both high school students. Nancy was “ a popular, pretty, virginal girl” who liked to “read, cook, sew, dance, ride horseback” (In cold blood, p. 84). Kenyon was a very sensitive and intelligent boy, a good carpenter
“Why? Why? The girl gasped, as they lunged down the old deer trail. Behind them they could hear shots, and glass breaking as the men came to the bogged car” (Hood 414). It is at this precise moment Hood’s writing shows the granddaughter’s depletion of her naïve nature, becoming aware of the brutality of the world around her and that it will influence her future. Continuing, Hood doesn’t stop with the men destroying the car; Hood elucidated the plight of the two women; describing how the man shot a fish and continued shooting the fish until it sank, outlining the malicious nature of the pair and their disregard for life and how the granddaughter was the fish had it not been for the grandmother’s past influencing how she lived her life. In that moment, the granddaughter becomes aware of the burden she will bear and how it has influenced her life.
The lack of support and affection protagonists, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, causes them to construct their lives on their own without a motherly figure. Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula, displays the development of Sula and Nel through childhood into adulthood. Before Sula and Nel enter the story, Morrison describes the history of the Peace and Wright family. The Peace family live abnormally to their town of Medallion, Ohio. Whereas the Wrights have a conventional life style, living up to society’s expectations.The importance of a healthy mother-daughter relationship is shown through the interactions of Eva and Hannah Peace, Hannah and Sula, and between Helene Wright and Nel. When Sula and Nel become friends they realize the improper parenting they
The Bragg family grew up with virtually nothing. The father left the family a number of times, offering no financial assistance and stealing whatever he could before he left. When he was there, he was usually drunk and physically abusive to the mother. He rarely went after the children, but when he did the mother was always there to offer protection. Mr. Bragg's mother's life consisted of working herself to exhaustion and using whatever money she had on the children.
and Mrs. Frank’s different personalities, it results in different actions and relations with other characters in the Annex. An example would be shown through how their relationship with their daughter, Anne. Throughout the play it is clearly revealed that Anne favors her father over her mother, pushing all aid and comfort of her mother aside. For instance, in scene four of Act One, Anne has a horrid nightmare and wakes the whole Annex. When her mother attempted to console her, the text states, “ I’d rather not talk about… You don’t have to. Will you please ask Father to come?” (Anne 360) Anne persistently rejects her mother and shuts her out. Though her relationship with her father is completely different. In the text it said, “I run to you like a baby… I love you, Father. I don’t love anyone but you.” (Anne 361) Anne is surely exaggerating her emotions about only loving her father, and feels an urge to rebel against her
Despite the Grandmother’s earlier preaching about the horrid character of the Misfit, when put in a back-to-the-wall situation she says, “I know you’re a good man”. The Grandmother’s strong concept of morality goes out the window when she is in a precarious situation. This is not unjustified, as she simply wants to make it out of the situation alive, yet it calls into question her character and the strength of her convictions. It also makes the readers themselves question their own morality; what would they do in a similar situation? The reader can feel sympathy for the Grandmother in this dangerous situation, yet it is her actions as the conversation progresses that cause the reader to pause and truly question the character of the Grandmother. The Misfit’s assistants systematically kill her family, as they are taken into the woods and shot. Throughout this time, the Grandmother seems to only be focused on self-preservation, with her only recognition of something awry being two isolated yells of “Bailey Boy!” O’Connor is showing the character of not just the Grandmother, but what she perceives to be the common trend in 1950’s culture. The idea of family unity and selflessness, even by those who propagate the idea, is forgotten when the individual is
The characterization of Cato and Emerson’s stepmother and father is what lead to the parental neglect on the two brothers. In the short story, “The Farmer’s Children,” the stepmother is characterized as
May is a highly opinionated woman, and the attitudes that she has about people shapes her interaction about them in different ways. No matter how much abuse she takes from her sons, she refuses to ever say a negative word about them in front of Mr. Greenleaf because he is so inferior to them that it would be unacceptable to let him know of any imperfections in her precious sons. Mrs. May also looks down her nose at Mrs. Greenleaf, who is eccentric but sincere in her Christian faith. Every day, Mr. Greenleaf’s wife prays intensely over clippings of tragedies from the newspaper that she buries in the woods, rolling on the ground, sobbing, and crying out to the Lord in “prayer healings.” Mrs. May thinks that this is a waste of time and that Mrs. Greenleaf is an irresponsible mother, because she doesn’t fawn over her children the way Mrs. May does. And if that is not enough, she also takes issue with the Greenleafs’ two sons, twins O.T. and E.T. They served in the military and earned a pension, and invested it into raising cattle. Now they have managed to establish a successful homestead and right before “Greenleaf” begins they have just gotten new high-tech machines for milking the cows. Mrs. May, however, is of the opinion that they have just mooched everything from the government, and that it is scandalous that someone from a family like theirs could rise in social standing and become
Addie Bundren, the wife of Anse Bundren and the matriarch of a poor southern family, is very ill, and is expected to die soon. Her oldest son, Cash, puts all of his carpentry skills into preparing her coffin, which he builds right in front of Addie’s bedroom window. Although Addie’s health is failing rapidly, two of her other sons, Darl and Jewel, leave town to make a delivery for the Bundrens’ neighbor, Vernon Tull, whose wife and two daughters have been tending to Addie. Shortly after Darl and Jewel leave, Addie dies. The youngest Bundren child, Vardaman, associates his mother’s death with that of a fish he caught and cleaned earlier that day. With some help, Cash completes the coffin just before dawn. Vardaman is troubled by the fact that his mother is nailed shut inside a box, and while the others sleep, he bores holes in the lid, two of which go through his mother’s face. Addie and Anse’s daughter, Dewey Dell, whose recent sexual liaisons with a local farmhand named Lafe have left her pregnant, is so overwhelmed by anxiety over her condition that she barely mourns her mother’s death. A funeral service is held on the following day, where the women sing songs inside the Bundren house while the men stand outside on the porch talking to each other.