Melissa Hardy's short story, "The Heifer," tells the story of a young woman named Aina who travels to Canada to start a new life with her husband. Aina is raised in a traditional Finnish home and defies her father by leaving to be with her love. She is blinded by the childhood romance and jumps at the chance to be with Uwe. This severe shift in lifestyle affects Aina and changes her forever. Her innocence is quickly jaded and exchanged for a cynical outlook on life. She realizes her survival is in her own hands and does whatever it takes to live.
Aina is fourteen when Uwe leaves for Canada. She is devastated after his departure. She waits four years until he sends for her to come. Fourteen is a young age to fall in love. Aina is blinded by love and ignores the fact that she hardly knows Uwe anymore. In those four years, her imagination creates pictures of him and romantic scenarios that never actually occur. After recalling "memories" over and over during the time he is gone, she begins to believe they all transpired. ."..A whole new love began to assemble itself of out bits and pieces and snatches of memory. Some of these memories were of things that had actually happened- wildflowers that he had one day picked for her and given her by the stone wall near her father's well...Others were of events that she had wished had transpired, sentiments that she hoped he might one day express" (Hardy 99). Uwe writes her only twice during the four years allowing Aina to form her own ideas of what he is doing. With her spare time she invents a dream world that she visits to see Uwe. When Uwe sends the money order for her ticket Aina, she is overwhelmed. "However, the idea of leaving her family and her village and every...
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...y see the situation. When she is finally in Canada, she realizes that she doesn't love him and the situation turns hopeless. Aina is a woman who doesn't take no for an answer. Many other women may have given up and accepted their new life. She refuses to do so. She never gives up hope that she will return to her family and the life she loves. Her strong spirit pushes her through. Aina's decision to kill Uwe is a drastic one for the circumstance. She could have simply left while he was away instead of murdering him. It is the death of Olga, her cow, which pushes her over the edge to commit the violent act. When she returns to Finland she marries again and has many children; she carries out the traditional life for which she is destined. Aina is the paradigm of how a difficult situation can cause a person to use cold animal instincts to save his or herself.
Shostak, out of all the women in the tribe had made close connections with a fifty year old woman with the name of Nisa. The woman, Nisa, is what the book is about. The book is written in Nisa’s point of view of her life experiences while growing up in that type of society. Nisa’s willingness to speak in the interviews about her childhood and her life gave Shostak a solid basis on what to write her book on. Nisa’s life was filled with tragedies. She had gone through certain situations where Nisa loses two of her children as infants and two as adults. She had also lost her husband soon after the birth of one of their children. According to Shostak, “None of the women had experiences as much tragedy as Nisa…” (Shostak, 351).
The incestuous nature of story telling which is featured in Ahab's wife is reminiscent of the Anne Sexton's poem, Briar Rose. Una is in a constant search for sustenance. Her mind as cannot exist without the hope of learning and engulfing knowledge. As a child, it was the occupation of her father to appease her insatiable appetite. This was done with stories and the boundless possibilities she was allowed to find within the recesses of her mind. As time progresses and Una grew, her father started to question the conclusions and presumptions that these internal scavenger hunts were building within her.
Nella Larsen wrote Helga to be ahead of her time. She’s a fiercely materialistic and intelligent woman of bi-racial ethnicity in a time that did not allow for bending of social norms and roles. Because of these strict societal barriers and her own self-doubt and internal struggle, Helga continually lets herself drown in the quicksand that is her isolationist feelings and life.
Readers are able to connect with the notion of everlasting relationship between a mother and child. She tries to bring light to a dark situation. Mandy recalls old memories to her mother and makes her mother remember the goodness in her that appears to cleanse away the darkness from her allowing her to be set free. Jane Yolen makes it clear to readers that love overpowers fear that was provoked by the undead mother.
The first snowfall signals the true arrival of the winter season in the Canadian tundra and woodland. A gray wolf sets out on a hunting expedition in the fresh, brisk air of the morning. A young, innocent bison, has been separated from its herd, it will soon be killed. In the eye’s of an unaware onlooker, the act is pure evil; that little bison did not deserve to die; however, the wolf is a mother and has hungry pups to feed. The pups would otherwise starve to death if she didn’t go hunting. Hedda Gabler is that wolf in Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler. On the superficial level, Hedda establishes herself as immoral and with a sole intent to hurt others. Sympathetically, the wolf was purely hunting for survival. Similarly, Ibsen progressed
Since Ma’s kidnapping, seven years prior, she has survived in the shed of her capturer’s backyard. This novel contains literary elements that are not only crucial to the story, but give significance as well. The point-of-view brings a powerful perspective for the audience, while the setting and atmosphere not only affect the characters but evokes emotion and gives the reader a mental picture of their lives, and the impacting theme along-side conflict, both internal and external, are shown throughout the novel. The author chooses to write the novel through the eyes of the main character and narrator, Jack. Jack’s perception of the world is confined to an eleven foot square room.
In the short story, “Adventure”, Alice Hindman lives a life full of illusions and loneliness. Alice is a very quiet person on the exterior while a passion boils underneath. Alice Hindman is limited by life denying truths and guilty of allowing them to run her life. She believes in love and tradition absolutely. Alice’s blindness to the changing social mores limits her capacity to progress forward in life. She become consumed instead by the idea of herself and her memories. “It is not going to come to me. I will never find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?” (Anderson 117). If she cannot have Ned, she will have no other.
influence all her life and struggles to accept her true identity. Through the story you can
One day, when Harry enters to his room, he founds Maria naked on his bed, and he inferred it is an Armanda's present, so that, he lives a relation with Maria who has never experimented the erotism and love. One day before the mask dance, Maria tells Harry about the fair she fells in lost him, because surely, on the next day, he is going to be Armanda's.
...alized that “a girl was not, as [she] had supposed, simply what [she] was; it was what [she] had to become” she was starting to admit defeat, and then finally when she begins to cry, it is here that the narrator understands that there is no escape from the pre-determined duties that go along with the passage of a child into being a girl, and a girl into a woman, and that “even in her heart. Maybe it (her understanding that conforming is unstoppable) was true”
Unrealistically, the narrator believes that she would be of use to her father more and more as she got older. However, as she grows older, the difference between boys and girls becomes more clear and conflicting to her.
Dark blankets flatten over the roaring skies, as the waves rose twenty feet high, beating against the sharp rocks, and a baby with eyes bluer than the ocean was born. Puakai, was her name, which meant “Ocean Flower”. Puakai did not have any parents, nor any family; she was alone. However, she did not have a need for family, for the island was all she needed. The island and it’s animals raised and watched over the young baby who became a strong, beautiful woman. She learned the ways of the island very fast. Puakai loved the island with all her heart and lived to protect it. She had a special bond with the island, she could feel when it was in pain, angry or even sad. Since she was born and raised from the wilderness, she had no reason to fear
He is gone for such a long time that she has no choice but to find another man to support her. Her old husband’s kinsmen find out about what she has done and send her into exile. This exile was not her choice, similar to the wanderer. The reader should feel sympathy for the wife because she would have not survived on her own if she did not find another man to support her. She was only looking out for herself. She is then sent by her old husband’s kinsmen to live in the woods in a hole in the ground. She is utterly alone with only herself to keep company. Similar to the other two poems, she had an abundance of time to think about her life during her
She remembers how she fantasized about the love affairs that she secretly read about in her romance novels, envisioning her life to comprise of similar satisfactions. She recalls how her vivid imagination had engrossed her into the depths of the story. One may say that this sudden change could be due to her imagination implanting false information into her head. Life certainly has not turned out the way she dreamed.
Mare and her family lived in New York City. Her mother was a single parent who tried all her best to make sure that her children had all that the need. Sometimes Mara’s mother Shana didn’t have money, so they went to bed without food. Mara’s life was not how she wanted it to be. She wanted a big house, a father, and a happy big family. Instead her life was the opposite. Her dad died when she was only seven. When her father died, it ruined the family. Her father was the backbone of th...