There is an infinite number of personalities and the best art works portray them vividly and truthfully. Some people are practical, while others are more abstract. In the comedic novels about family life, Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) and Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother's Boarders by Rosemary Taylor (1943), the practical characters are in the forefront. While representing different life phases due to their age difference, Gibbons's main character Flora Poste is quite similar in her life views and actions to Taylor's Mother. The central theme is the conflict between notions of practicality and romance, reflected by the actions of the heroines, which happen to be heavily affected by their unconventional upbringings.
The main characters of both novels, Flora Poste and Mother, are driven by modern common sense customary of their time. Flora, orderly and well-educated, lives her life through what she learns in self-help books. She is confident that she knows best. Therefore, after meeting Starkadders the only thing that comes to her mind is to attempt to make them “normal” by her standards. She is obsessed with order in other people's lives, as well as in her own. When she finds out about more Starkadder women in Sussex, she tells herself that she would rescue Elfine, but beyond that would make no promises. Flora's practical nature helps her to bring change in other characters despite the conflict between her values and the values of the Cold Comfort Farm's natives. Taylor's Mother seeks to extend her family and minds the business of others. Both heroines manifest their practicality by manipulating people's lives, who happen to be around them and not fit certain norms. Mother and Flora take on the ambitious tas...
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...bbons's dominatrix, Ada Doom, in the fact that both of them represent power, which belongs to women within the traditional extended family (Faye 846). However, Mother stays practical and ordinary until the end, with an exception of the period after Father's death, while Ada, like Flora, or the rest of the Cold Comfort Farm's natives, dramatically changes within one chapter under Flora's manipulation.
Works Cited
Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. London: The Penguin Group, 2006. Print.
Taylor, Rosemary. Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother's Boarders. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1943. Print.
Gerrard, Christine.“Sense and Sensibility in Cold Comfort Farm.” English Review November 2004: 2. Print.
Hammil, Faye.“Cold Comfort Farm, D.H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars.” Modern Fiction Studies Winter 2001: 831-854. Print.
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