The Power of Misperception in “A Jonquil for Mary Penn”
Wendell Berry’s “A Jonquil for Mary Penn” is set on a farm in a small, tight-knit community near the beginning of the twentieth century. The story opens in pre-dawn’s swarthy darkness on a cold March morning. Mary Penn wakes to find herself sick for the first time since she married Elton a year and a half previously at age seventeen. Mary attempts to hide how she feels from her husband as he eats before he heads out to help plow his neighbor’s corn ground. Mary finds herself spending the day engulfed in uncharacteristic self-pity and reflecting on her life. She reflects on how her upper-class family did not accept her marriage to Elton and rejected Mary for as good as dead. She compares
…show more content…
He uses the limited omniscient to give am intimacy in what Mary’s thinking and also the restriction of not knowing the other character’s actions until they are revealed at the end of the story but he balances this with providing context to her thoughts with the dramatic point of view. Usually, a person’s thoughts don’t need to provide ourselves with context for our own experiences, so Berry uses dramatic point of view to provide what would be missing from exclusively Mary’s thoughts. Berry uses the point of view illuminate Mary’s experience with belonging and the differences between the community of her birth and her new community. Her family had rejected her, “her parents told her. She no longer belonged to that family. To them it would be as if she had never lived” (67). That is enough to damage anyone’s sense of belonging and even though her new community welcomes, includes, teaches, and loves her like the family she lost, perhaps in her sickness a deeply buried insecurity of not belonging rears its head. Because her family didn’t accept her, Mary worries that her new community won’t accept her when she is at her worst, sick and insecure. But when she wakes she realizes that Elton had noticed, cared, and worried for her and in her sleep, her neighbor had come to her and cared for her. “It was a different world, a new world to her, that …show more content…
Mary has never been sick since she married Elton causing her family to disowned her and “she and Elton had quarreled the night before” (65). Mary’s husband is off at somebody else’s farm for the day, far from her and at home Mary is sick, alone, and miserable--her mood reflecting the weather. Berry tells us about their neighborhood of six small farms working together in fellowship and genuine camaraderie. Berry builds a setting in which Mary is happy and feels a sense of belonging which he juxtaposes with an insecurity wrought from sickness and doubt. Mary describes herself and Elton as each other’s half and even in quarrels, their halves yearned towards each other burning to be whole. Berry again juxtaposes, “their wholeness came upon them in a rush of light, around them and within them, so that she felt they must be shining in the dark. But now that wholeness was not imaginable; she felt herself without counterpart, a mere fragment of something unknown, dark and broken off” (79). There is a noticeable shift in Mary’s normal attitude as a result of her sickness and this is emphasized the emotional setting. In the physical setting, Berry uses the stove and the fire to limn her emotional setting, as she goes to bed the fire is burning low but she doesn’t have the energy to bring herself to rebuild the fire. When Mary wakes, Josie Tom has rebuilt the
...wis a little about her life before she entered the institution. She tells a story about how her and her father used to go duck hunting, but instead of using a dog to get the dead ducks out of the cold lakes, her father used to make her go out and fetch the ducks. This helps to enhance Cherry’s role as a mental patient, as we are all left wondering if this story is true, or if it merely a story with small bits of truth, concocted by Cherry’s own mind.
The protagonist is Ann who has lived on the farm with her husband of seven years. Her life is tedious and lonely. Her nearest neighbor is Stephen, a bachelor living on a farm about two miles away. John, Ann’s husband, has little ambition other than make his farm work. He loves Ann and is very proud that she is his wife. On the other hand, Ann finds much that she is
Soon Mary Anne became gloomy and would not talk to anyone. She had fallen in love with the landscape. The next morning she and the six Greenies were gone. It crushed Mark Fossie when he heard of it, he would walk around and mutter "Lost.”(220) Mary Anne came back three weeks later, but she had changed.
Another known regional writer from this time period is Mary Wilkins Freeman. Similar to Jewett, her texts use the New England geographical setting. Mary Wilkins Freeman’s short stories and novels are local color examples of the New England area in which she was born. Her works include the New England dialects and traits, components of the area’s Puritan roots, and portrayals of life in rural and penurious New England. During the time of Freeman’s writing, many farmers had begun to move west, particularly because of the spread of railroads. This caused the rural New England population to drop tremendously. Freeman’s protagonists are mainly elderly women or young women of marriageable age of families who remained behind in this New England post-Civil War setting.
Mary is still in deep love with John, conversely John only uses Mary for selfish pleasure. In here, Atwood breaks away from the telling of stories from third person to sentences of second. “He comes to her apartment twice a week and she cooks him dinner, you’ll notice that he doesn’t even consider her worth the price of a dinner out…” (96). This interruption is to revert back to the main idea of Atwood talking directly to the audience and informing them of how the character John treats and views Mary, which is complete turnaround from the previous Story A which went into no detail into either character’s thoughts or actions whatsoever. Another form of specific detail gets used through similes.
The story starts out with a hysterical.woman who is overprotected by her loving husband, John. She is taken to a summer home to recover from a nervous condition. However, in this story, the house is not her own and she does not want to be in it. She declares it is “haunted” and “that there is something queer about it” (The Yellow Wall-Paper. 160). Although she acknowledges the beauty of the house and especially what surrounds it, she constantly goes back to her feeling that there is something strange about the house. It is not a symbol of security for the domestic activities, it seems like the facilitates her release, accommodating her, her writing and her thoughts, she is told to rest and sleep, she is not even allow to write. “ I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word”(162). This shows how controlling John is over her as a husband and doctor. She is absolutely forbidden to work until she is well again. Here John seems to be more of a father than a husband, a man of the house. John acts as the dominant person in the marriage; a sign of typical middle class, family arrangement.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the character of Janie Crawford experiences severe ideological conflicts with her grandmother, and the effects of these conflicts are far-reaching indeed. Hurston’s novel of manners, noted for its exploration of the black female experience, fully shows how a conflict with one’s elders can alter one’s self image. In the case of Janie and Nanny, it is Janie’s perception of men that is altered, as well as her perception of self. The conflict between the two women is largely generational in nature, and appears heart-breakingly inevitable. Hurston’s Nanny has seen a lot of trouble in her life.
Her parents meet at a social gathering in town and where married shortly thereafter. Marie’s name was chosen by her grandmother and mother, “because they loved to read the list was quite long with much debate over each name.” If she was a boy her name would have been Francis, so she is very happy to have born a girl. Marie’s great uncle was a physician and delivered her in the local hospital. Her mother, was a housewife, as was the norm in those days and her father ran his own business. Her mother was very close with her parents, two brothers, and two sisters. When her grandmother was diagnosed with asthma the family had to move. In those days a warm and dry climate was recommended, Arizona was the chosen state. Because her grandma could never quite leave home, KY, the family made many trips between the states. These trips back and forth dominated Marie’s childhood with her uncles and aunts being her childhood playmates.
At the beginning of the story, in plot “A”, John and Mary are introduced as a stereotypical happy couple with stereotypically happy lives of middle class folks. Words like “stimulating” and “challenging” are used repetitiously to describe events in thei...
...as they throw themselves against walls. This rehearsed behavior supports Alexie’s rhetorical agenda. The relationship is superficial and very scientific with very little emotion because they feel obligated to act eccentric so that people actually have a reason to stare. Also, both characters are very intelligent and think of life in a sensible, mathematical way. Jeremiah refers to Mary Lynn as the “constant” in his life. Their ethnicity in conjunction with their rational personalities directly causes their relationship to be very dull and dysfunctional.
Janie’s first attempt at love does not turn out quite like she hopes. Her grandmother forces her into marrying Logan Killicks. As the year passes, Janie grows unhappy and miserable. By pure fate, Janie meets Joe Starks and immediately lusts after him. With the knowledge of being wrong and expecting to be ridiculed, she leaves Logan and runs off with Joe to start a new marriage. This is the first time that Janie does what she wants in her search of happiness: “Even if Joe was not waiting for her, the change was bound to do her good…From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything” (32). Janie’s new outlook on life, although somewhat shadowed by blind love, will keep her satisfied momentarily, but soon she will return to the loneliness she is running from.
“It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mourning notes without promise, devoid even of hope. She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro, down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the glittering circlet.
Janie’s life with Joe fulfilled a need -- she had no financial worries and was more than set for life. She had a beautiful white home, a neat lawn and garden, a successful husband, and lots of cash. Everything was clean, almost too clean. A sense of restraint is present in this setting, and this relates to the work as a whole due to the fact that this is the epitome of unhappiness for Janie.
Myra, who is dying of illness, escapes the confinement of her stuffy, dark apartment. She refuses to succumb to death in an insubordinate manner. By leaving the apartment and embracing open space, Myra rejects the societal pressure to be a kept woman. Myra did not want to die “like this, alone with [her] mortal enemy” (Cather, 85). Myra wanted to recapture the independence she sacrificed when eloping with Oswald. In leaving the apartment, Myra simultaneously conveys her disapproval for the meager lifestyle that her husband provides for her and the impetus that a woman needs a man to provide for her at all. Myra chose to die alone in an open space – away from the confinement of the hotel walls that served as reminders of her poverty and the marriage that stripped her of wealth and status. She wished to be “cremated and her ashes buried ‘in some lonely unfrequented place in the mountains, or in the sea” (Cather, 83). She wished to be alone once she died, she wanted freedom from quarantining walls and the institution of marriage that had deprived her of affluence and happiness. Myra died “wrapped in her blankets, leaning against the cedar trunk, facing the sea…the ebony crucifix in her hands” (Cather, 82). She died on her own terms, unconstrained by a male, and unbounded by space that symbolized her socioeconomic standing. The setting she died in was the complete opposite of the space she had lived in with Oswald: It was free space amid open air. She reverted back to the religious views of her youth, symbolizing her desire to recant her ‘sin’ of leaving her uncle for Oswald, and thus abandoning her wealth. “In religion , desire was fulfillment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded”( Cather, 77), it was not the “object of the quest that brought satisfaction” (Cather, 77). Therefore, Myra ends back where she began; she dies holding onto
...the two characters having flashbacks about their life together, now that Dr. Cochran is dying. The unlighted lamps are what triggered each other’s memories of one another and parts of their life. The dancing light from the mirror and the match, the moonlight and the swinging lantern, and to the very end with the forgotten lighted cigarette. The ending that the author made with the cigarette, will be another triggered memory for Mary, with the light and her father’s death. That makes the whole story come together with a new memory with dancing lights