Review Of Mavis Gallant's The Other Paris

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In the Other Paris, Mavis Gallant presents the unloving and rushed nature of marriage expressed through her usage of detached diction and the caricatures of intellectual young adults pressured by societal expectations, in the 1950’s, towards marriage.
Gallant’s usage of disconnected diction as she describes the “unsuitable medical student with no money and eight years’ training still to go” satirizes the materialistic societal pressures on women to marry financially reliable men, further emphasizing the unloving nature of marriage during this time. This express the unempathetic societal expectations towards the marriage of young adults, due to the unfeeling and analytic concept of the man being “unsuitable” for holy matrimony due to his lack of wealth. …show more content…

“The fact that Carol was not in love with Howard Mitchell did not dismay her in the least.” Love is wholly unimportant to Carol, as far as choosing a husband goes. Through college lectures, blaring the materialistic expectations surrounding marriage, Carol comes to not believe in the necessity of love in a successful marriage. Marriage, to Carol, exists in environment, to the point she believes the weather might affect it. “Love required only the right conditions, like a geranium.” This sentence compares love to a plant, a material possession fully affected by its environment, and demonstrates the belief of Carol’s, and the society around her that gave her that belief in the first place, that love can be generated almost scientifically. This unreasonable and hyperbolic assumption, key to Carol’s character and her motivations in marriage, criticizes society’s disbelief in love existing no matter the circumstances or differences between

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