My uncle was the definition of a big teddy bear, loving and hugging everyone. Little did I know he would keel on the pavement and his wonderful life would end in a split second. No goodbyes, no last-minute preparations, nothing. This is the definition of life. I, on the other hand, come into the picture by relating the relationships between him, myself, and others compared to that in the novel Our Town. Throughout the novel Our Town, written by Thornton Wilder, Wilder displays three main important concepts he wants the audience to understand: relationships with others are more important than we comprehend in the moment, relationships determine our overall happiness in life, and relationships control our regrets we have in the future.
Emily
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Webb didn't realize the importance of the relationship with her mother and how they affected her until after she died. Emily would go through the motions of her day, like the typical teenager, not stopping to look at the little things in life. An example would be when Emily picked an unimportant day in her life to travel back to, then realized the great importance of that day afterward. “Well, now, dear, a very happy birthday to my girl and many happy returns. There are some surprises waiting for you on the kitchen table.” It seems this scene in the novel is key to understanding the relationship between Emily and her mother. They do not interact much, and think little of it. Emily’s mom isn’t even looking at her daughter during the majority of this scene. This shows that even when they are interacting, they do not seriously talk about their feelings and gain trust and build up their relationship: it is without eye contact and petty things like finding a lost ribbon: (EMILY) Mama, I can't find my blue hair ribbon anywhere. (MRS. WEBB) Just open your eyes, dear, that's all. I laid it out for you special on the dresser, there. If it were a snake it would bite. Like what was said before, Emily thinks little of this interaction in the moment, but afterwards, realizes its importance of how little of a relationship her and her mother really had. Relating back to my story, I had very similar interactions with my uncle. My uncle always bought me a lot of presents and was always there for me in many ways I hadn't realized. I usually took advantage of the shower of cheap gifts and love, and I realized my mistake when I started missing him and his unique gifts. Now, those presents and letters from him are one of the most treasured things I keep in my room. He also always hosted barbeques at his place for all of the family members to get together and catch up on things. After he died, there were no more barbeques like these, and I still cannot eat a chicken drumstick without thinking of him and how much of an influence he had on my life. After she realizes their insignificant relationship, Emily starts to regret certain things that she did, or didn't do, in her lifetime. The most common regret Emily states is how she didn’t connect more with her family. Emily describes this in her monologue while she is watching interactions between their past selves: (EMILY) Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally's dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's look at one another. In this example, Emily is referring to unimportant interactions she had with her mother that she regrets. Just like Emily, I regretted many things after my uncle died. Most examples included things I should have said, taking advantage of the last moments I had with him, and appreciating him in my life. Before my uncle died, I spent a lot of time with him at his last barbeque. What was cool was we had never spent so much bonding time together one-on-one. The last thing he did with me was when he taught me how to cook his special chicken drumstick recipe, and I remember thinking, “Wow! This is fun. I‘m so looking forward to doing it again.” The weight came crashing down on me after he died that I would never get to do anything with him. I could never build up that relationship anymore than I had left it. So I know exactly how Emily feels when the weight of the rushing and unimportant interactions weigh down on her and finally contribute to the last theme of the novel with relationships: happiness. Emily seemed completely satisfied with her life until she travel back to her 12th birthday and witnessed many things she didn’t notice at the time.
Examples include not seeing much of her father, wasting time finding things she doesn’t need, and taking her mother for granted. She realizes all of this when she says, “I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another.” Emily feels so unhappy, and decides to share the truth out loud to her “past” mother: “Mother Gibbs, George and I have made that farm into just the best place you ever saw. We thought of you all the time. We wanted to show you the new barn and a great long ce-ment drinking fountain for the stock. We bought that out of the money you left us.” At this point, the truth Emily was keeping inside is finally out. The truth is that relationships really matter the most and Emily knows she wouldn’t be anywhere if it weren’t for her mother. She also understands that these relationships are the important things in life that need to be appreciated. My realization occurred quite like Emily’s...I wanted to share things and experience more with my uncle. When he was gone, I couldn’t even tell him one last time that I loved him. Those details will forever haunt me, which I think about a lot. I miss him, and it makes me unhappy when I look back on our limited relationship. But I now realize how much the relationship mattered to …show more content…
me. Emily’s relationship with her mother is a main theme throughout the novel.
We see this by how Emily doesn’t say in detail her relationships with others; just her mother. This means on some level, one that Emily doesn’t realize until it is too late, that Emily loves her mother and she appreciates her and her role in Emily’s life. Emily portrays the themes of relationships regarding happiness, regrets, and importance through this epiphany. The relationship I had with my uncle represents the exact same comparison...I realized the impact of the relationship after he passed away, regretted things I didn’t do and say to him, and my happiness would be completely different if he was still here. I would forever be walking around, oblivious to how relationships can really affect the lives of
others.
In, 'A Rose for Emily', Emily is being kept and locked away from the world. Her father keeps her isolated with only the company of their servant. The people of the town “remembered all the young men her father had driven away” (Faulkner 219). Because of this, Emily grew well past the age of being courted and finding a husband. After he died, she was left even more alone than before. Her family was not really present in her life ever since they and her father had an argument and did not keep in touch. The people of the town also helped with the isolation of Emily. The people have always regarded the family as strange and mysterious keeping their distance. Emily had “a vague resemblance to those angels in the colored church windows- sort of tragic and serene” (Faulkner 220). She did not leave the house often and when she did, ...
Life is sad and tragic; some of which is made for us and some of which we make ourselves. Emily had a hard life. Everything that she loved left her. Her father probably impressed upon her that every man she met was no good for her. The townspeople even state “when her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad…being left alone…She had become humanized” (219). This sounds as if her father’s death was sort of liberation for Emily. In a way it was, she could begin to date and court men of her choice and liking. Her father couldn’t chase them off any more. But then again, did she have the know-how to do this, after all those years of her father’s past actions? It also sounds as if the townspeople thought Emily was above the law because of her high-class stature. Now since the passing of her father she may be like them, a middle class working person. Unfortunately, for Emily she became home bound.
We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn 't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.’ (25) This complete sheltering leaves Emily to play into with in her own deprived reality within her own mind, creating a skewed perception of reality and relationships”(A Plastic Rose,
Emily’s mother is just a teenager when she had Emily. She did not have the money or resources to take care of her, so she had to let Emily live with her grandparents for a couple of years before she could get Emily back. When Emily was two, her mother finally got her custody of her, but Emily is not the little girl she remembered. When the mother first had Emily, she described her as a beautiful baby (302), but it changed when Emily became sickly and got scars from chicken pox. The mother said, “When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone. (302)” Nevertheless, the mother is never there for Emily as she grew up. Emily tried to show her mother in different ways that she needed her, but she never seemed to catch the hint. For example, when Emily was two her mother sent her to a nursery school. The teacher of the nursery school was mistreating the children, and instead of telling her mother directly like the other kids told their parents, she told her in different ways. She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick. Momma, I feel sick. Momma, the teachers aren’t there today, they’re sick. Momma, we can’t go, there was a fire there last night. Momma, it’s a holiday
In Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” Emily is a very secretive, isolated woman. At one point Emily was exceptionally strange and mysterious. Binder states, “When Emily’s father dies, the physical presence of his influence dies with him, but the effects of his actions remain to wreak havoc on Emily’s future” (2.) In her childhood,
Having to send Emily in her early days to live with her father was a burdensome nuisance. All of Emily's father's attributes were rubbing off on her, "all of the baby loveliness gone," (p.
People should acknowledge the little things in life more often because when it's gone...it’s gone forever. In the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder, demonstrates life lessons that tend to go an unappreciative from generation to generation. This play takes place in a small fictional town called Grover's Corner, Massachusetts during the 1901-1913 time era. Our Town is a three act play that tells a story about how people live their lives using the same routine everyday. Thornton Wilder uses symbolism, dialogue, and manipulation of time to convey his theme, life is too short, therefore people should appreciate what they have now and people should take action to change lives.
Up to the very end of Miss Emily’s life, her father was in the foreground watching and controlling, and Miss Emily unrelentingly held on to the past. She went as far as keeping a loved one’s body locked upstairs in her home for years. While admiring her loved one’s body from up close and afar, she managed to maintain a death grip on the past.
People who thinks of Thornton Wilder primarily in terms of his classic novella “Our Town,” The Bridge of San Luis Rey will seem like quite a switch. For one thing, he has switched countries; instead of middle America, he deals here with Peru. He has switched eras, moving from the twentieth century back to the eighteenth. He has also dealt with a much broader society than he did in “Our Town,” representing the lower classes and the aristocracy with equal ease. But despite these differences, his theme is much the same; life is short, our expectations can be snuffed out with the snap of a finger, and in the end all that remains of us is those we have loved.
From the beginning of Emily's life she is separated from those she needed most, and the mother's guilt tears at the seams of a dress barely wrinkled. Emily was only eight months old when her father left her and her mother. He found it easier to leave than to face the responsibilities of his family's needs. Their meager lifestyle and "wants" (Olsen 601) were more than he was ready to face. The mother regrettably left the child with the woman downstairs fro her so she could work to support them both. As her mother said, "She was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes" (601). Eventually it came to a point where Emily had to go to her father's family to live a couple times so her mother could try to stabilize her life. When the child returned home the mother had to place her in nursery school while she worked. The mother didn't want to put her in that school; she hated that nursery school. "It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be toge...
Emily’s isolation is evident because after the men that cared about her deserted her, either by death or simply leaving her, she hid from society and didn’t allow anyone to get close to her. Miss Emily is afraid to confront reality. She seems to live in a sort of fantasy world where death has no meaning. Emily refuses to accept or recognize the death of her father, and the fact that the world around her is changing.
After Emily’s death, she arrives at the cemetery and joins the others who were buried there. Once here, Emily wishes to revisit a moment of her life. The others warn her not to, as it would be painful. The Stage Manager tells her it would be painful knowing what the living are not aware of, such as who dies and what becomes of everyone. Emily does not understand this and chooses to visit the day of her twelfth birthday. She returns to her twelfth birthday and everything was normal. Emily, for the first time, realizes her mother was once young. She experiences the rest of the day, receiving gifts, and tries to call out to her mother, saying “Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything. I can’t look at everything hard enough”(105). No one hears anything she says. After realizing everything is moving too fast and she does not have time to appreciate everything, she says goodbye to all the small things she will miss, like clocks ticking and coffee, and returns to the cemetery. From this experience, Emily learned that everything in life is special. Only in death did Emily fully appreciate everything she had. This blatantly shows Wilder trying to convey the message that everyone should learn to appreciate the little things in
The domineering attitude of Emily's father keeps her to himself, inside the house, and alone until his death. In his own way, Emily's father shows her how to love. Through a forced obligation to love only him, as he drives off young male callers, he teaches his daughter lessons of love. It is this dysfunctional love that resurfaces later, because it is the only way Emily knows how to love.
At the beginning of the story when her father died, it was mentioned that “[Emily] told [the ladies in town] that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body” (626). Faulkner reveals Emily’s dependency on her father through the death of her father. As shown in this part of the story, Emily was very attached to her father and was not able to accept that fact that he was no longer around. She couldn’t let go of the only man that loved her and had been with her for all those years. While this may seem like a normal reaction for any person who has ever lost a loved one, Faulkner emphasizes Emily’s dependence and attachment even further through Homer Barron. After her father’s death, Emily met a man name Homer, whom she fell in love with. While Homer showed interest in Emily at the beginning he became uninterested later on. “Homer himself had remarked—he liked men” (627) which had caused Emily to become devastated and desperate. In order to keep Homer by her side, Emily decided to poison Homer and keep him in a bedroom in her home. It was clear that she was overly attached to Homer and was not able to lose another man that she
Everyone has a moment that they are looking forward to. Times like weekends, holidays and days off help guide us through our life. While this way of thinking has many positive aspects, we lose the appreciation of all details of the moments that pass us by. Because we may see moments like holidays as "better" moments, we often fail to see the quality of the smaller ones that we overlook. We see these "small moments" in Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. The play takes us to a small town in New England and we see how simple it is, to the point where we may get bored due to the similarity to our lives. After witnessing events in the play we might have formerly perceived as big and important portrayed as relatively simple and straightforward, we begin to question how important these events are in our life. Not until death does one of the characters realize how much of life was ignored. But