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Genre analysis
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The broken, the loved, and the damned construct a cliche love story. The short stories A Sorrowful Woman by Godwin, Gail and A Secret Sorrow by Karen Van der Zee, contain key differences and similarities. Overall, A Secret Sorrow was more effective in terms of developing a main message as compared to A Sorrowful Woman. There are many concepts that make the two stories very different, but also very similar. A few key concepts could go either way; such as, the husbands, how the women cope with the sorrow, and the plot. First, within each story there is a loving husband looking out for his wife. However, how the husband’s help their wife differs between A Secret Sorrow and A Sorrowful Woman. Both of the husbands mean well, but in the story A Secret Sorrow, the husband Kai had a main point for what he is doing to help. He is very persistent on fixing the problems and making the situation better for good. In the midst of the situation, …show more content…
For starters, A Sorrowful Woman does not contain a standard plot, but is a complete short story. While A Secret Sorrow is an excerpt from a romance by Harlequin books. In addition, although both stories are more in the romantic category the endings are very unalike. In A Secret Sorrow Faye gets her happy ending with Kai by adopting children and having a family. However, in A Sorrowful Woman the woman locked herself away in a room and passed away. Within the plot Faye wants children, but is unable to reproduce. While in A Sorrowful Woman the woman had a child that she did not want. Her disgust for the child was clearly stated, “ The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again” (Godwin 38). Her disgust can also be proven by how she never refers to the child and her husband by name. Although small ideas, all of the concepts work together to build the plot; setting the two stories
In these two stories “A Rose for Emily’’ by William Faulkner, and “Good Country People’’ by Flannery O’Connor, there is controversy between two women, Emily and Hulga. The protagonists, Emily and Hulga, deal with many things as in being from a small town and being unattractive. Emily and Hulga’s town show some sympathy throughout the stories. I believe they are sympathized for because, they struggle for love, then finally find love, and then lose love.
The mother and daughter have a very distant relationship because her mother is ill and not capable to be there, the mother wishes she could be but is physically unable. “I only remember my mother walking one time. She walked me to kindergarten." (Fein). The daughter’s point of view of her mother changes by having a child herself. In the short story the son has a mother that is willing to be helpful and there for him, but he does not take the time to care and listen to his mother, and the mother begins to get fed up with how Alfred behaves. "Be quiet don't speak to me, you've disgraced me again and again."(Callaghan). Another difference is the maturity level the son is a teenager that left school and is a trouble maker. The daughter is an adult who is reflecting back on her childhood by the feeling of being cheated in life, but sees in the end her mother was the one who was truly being cheated. “I may never understand why some of us are cheated in life. I only know, from this perspective, that I am not the one who was.” (Fein). The differences in the essay and short story show how the children do not realize how much their mothers care and love
Thus, both novels, full of tragedy and sorrow, began with the promise of new land, new beginnings and a better life, but all three were impossible to find within the pages of these novels. In the end, it was broken relationships, broken families, broken communities, but most importantly, broken dreams and broken hopes that were left on the final pages of both woeful, yet celebrated, stories.
Gail Godwin's "A Sorrowful Woman<" leads one to believe that the wife is overwhelmed or possibly just having a bad day. The belief is that with her husband's understanding she and her family will get through this difficult time. Everyone has a bad day and people get aggravated at times. However, a shocking revelation comes to the reader that this isn't just a bad day. A deeper look into the story reveals that the wife's selfishness and pity for her life is fueling her sorrow and along with their lack of communication causes the demise of this family.
In conclusion, the women in both stories experienced two very different situations but overall deal with the same things. Selfishness plays a role in their thoughts and actions and unfaithfulness plays a role in the overall happiness in their marriages. With both selfishness and unfaithfulness controlling their thoughts and emotions they become confused and lose all control of the situation. Basically it is shocking to see how lightly affairs are taken into consideration and how the loss of a loved one doesn't affect people, as it should.
Thirdly, they both reach out to readers by showing their broken family and how hard separation is for them. Whites, with their view of the family as sacred, might see this as something that needs to be changed. Because both authors opened their narratives with family and its importance to them, they appealed to people who might have originally felt no sympathy for them.
There are three men in the story: Husband #1, Husband #2, and Robert. There is one wife who is connect too each man in some sort of relationship. First of all, Husband #1 and the wife were married. He was a military office and a childhood sweetheart. Somewhere in their relationship the wife got very unhappy in being an officers wife. She attempted to do suicide, but survived. “Her officer – why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want? – came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance” (34). The husband did not even care much for her. She felt very lonely. Before getting married, she met a guy name Robert. The wife worked for Robert as a reader because he was blind. While being married, Robert and the wife used to stay in touch by sending audiotapes back and fourth by telling him everything. Husband #1 was not successful in his marriage because his wife was totally unhappy with the
In the article, “Seperation and Sorrow: A Farm Woman’s Life by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg talks about a woman named Martha Schmidt Friesen who was a farmer living near Kendall,Kansas. In this article, the author discusses the hardship Martha had to face during the Great Depression. Not only did the author touch base on economic struggles but the emotional struggles and family separation that they had to face through out this depressive time for everyone in America. Kegrberg describes the hardship Martha faced with her children and husband through out the article for a great feel of how certain woman felt.
Both stories show feminism of the woman trying to become free of the male dominance. Unfortunately, the woman are not successful at becoming free. In the end, the two women’s lives are drastically
The story of how temptations, lifestyles, and influences upon women cause their true personalities and devotions to arise and corrupt their normal existence is clearly shown in both novels. They represent how little influence women have over their own lives, although certain aspects of their lives can completely rule or take control of their surroundings and therefore change them as individual women as well.
In both of these stories there are certain characteristics of females that are the same, they are inner strength, obedience, honor and respect, the good of the family is better than the good of the individual.
The wife begins to explain to her husband that a close friend of hers is going to stay with them. She does explain how he met the blind man to her husband but that still doesn’t stop him from being jealous and judgmental. “But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” The wife is expressing to her husband how she wants him to understand that she would do this for him if it was his friend coming to stay over. The narrator begins to have a mouth full of words before even meeting the blind man. The narrator explains the wife in more detail that she was married once before and was very unhappy in that relationship so unhappy that she tried to kill herself. She kept in touch with the blind man by sending back and forth tapes throughout her marriage and told everything to each other through their tapes. She kept the friendsh...
The narrator of this story acts as the protagonist, but he is unnamed. He is a dynamic character which he changes throughout the story. The conflicts of this story are character vs. self, where the narrator is second guessing his wife’s feeling towards him and their relationship. Also, the narrator is experiencing conflict with himself because he realized that he was blinded his whole life but, now he can see clearly. Another conflict is narrator vs. wife, where this relationship doesn’t have strong communication skills and many insecurities.
.... The other is a journey of self-exploration and learning about the challenges a woman must face just to live her life and help her grandchild. You can feel not only her struggles during her physical journey, but also the mental struggles she has faced in life and along her path. Through both styles of writing, you can emerge yourself into the theme of the story or poem and emotionally connect on some level with each character. As a reader, you can enjoy different styles of writing and allow your personal imagination to take away from it what you choose. Short stories and poems each have their own styles and differ in the way they are actually constructed, but ultimately, the reader is still taken into the life of the character that is depicted. The goal is to unite the reader and the characters and allow the reader to become one with the literary work on some level.
The two novels prove the claim of the research, which is working on the female characters; and that is why these novels are chosen and made a comparison between them. Both of the writers make their protagonists the victims and from another side send to them the one who will help them to overcome their ordeal. Finally, their life has completely changed and reached what they want.