Suffering In Fever 1793

Suffering is apart of life, just like joy and love is. We can never choose how life treats us but we can always choose how we react and get back up again. Through Fever 1793 we see up close and personal how suffering can affect us, and how sometimes it can affect us in positive ways. How suffering can help turn the page to the next chapter in our lives. How suffering doesn’t always mean losing but also gaining.

Laurie Anderson clearly lays out the Yellow Fever through the eyes of 14 year old Mattie. We experience suffering and disease along with the characters, how it affects us and the kind of person we can become because of it. We see how a city raving with disease handles itself and how it is put back together again. We see the kind of people that survive and blossom because of suffering, like Mattie who

“You’re sleeping the day away.I can’t tell who is lazier, Polly or you,” Mother muttered as she stalked out of the room. “When I was a girl, we were up before the sun . . .” (1)This is our first look into Mattie’s world, we see the tension between her and her mother and we get to see Mattie’s much more lazier and childish side.Through the rest of her day we see inside Mattie’s world at the coffee house, her family owns, we experience along with Mattie her Mother’s nagging, but also Mattie’s constant complaining. ”Dash it all, Grandfather said I was a Daughter of Liberty, a real American girl. I could steer my own ship. No one would call me little Mattie. They would call me “Ma’am.”(2) This shows us Mattie’s desire for a more adventurous life, how her dreams are so much bigger than what her family wants, mostly because she’s never really experienced more than her everyday life. This shows Mattie is ready to grow up, she just needs that