The Good Times with Lucy The story “Death by Landscape” by Margaret Atwood is of a protagonist named Lois who at the time was young but most of the story takes place of when she was an older lady. When Lois was younger, she attended a summer camp named Manitou. From the start, Lois didn’t like camp until she got to the age of ten and met a very good friend named Lucy. Lois remembers their childhood memories they had with one another, until one day Lois’s best friend Lucy disappears. Lucy and Lois are on a trip and all Lois hears is a scream and never once saw Lucy after that. As the story moves along, Lois later started collecting paintings in remembrance of her childhood friend Lucy. Towards the end of the story you can really start to feel …show more content…
Lois has a difficult time dealing with her feelings and the situation but as time goes on she heals from it. As the story goes on, you can start to see that even though Lois lost her best friend she sees in the end that her best friend Lucy is still with her in the landscapes she collects. Yes, it seemed like Lois was an emotional weak character after she lost her best friend, but towards the end of the story it also shows that she had a way of picking herself back up. Lois picked herself back up by thinking positive and believing that even though Lucy may have not been there her physically she was with her spritely through the paintings she collected. Although this was such a difficult time for Lois you can tell that she not once had a negative thoughts, it was always positive things she was saying to hold herself up. For example, at the end of the story you could see that she was trying to find every way to believe that Lucy was still with her, “Everyone has to be somewhere, and this is where Lucy is. She is in Lois’s apartment, in the holes that open inwards on the wall, not lie windows bit like doors. She is here. She is entirely live.” (Atwood
The setting takes place in April at a funeral. There was a “gardenia on the smooth brown wood” (Holczer 1). They have been “wandering across the great state of California” (2). The setting moves to Grace's grandma’s house. It was “two stories with attic windows”, “sky-blue paint with white trim”, “ and a wood porch” (19). There were “two chairs covered in yellowed plastic and pine needles” (19). There was a gently sloped driveway. Inside the house there were “piles of Tupperware and glass dishes” (19). Outside there was a shed, garden, trees, and
This book is about a girl name Ellen Foster who is ten years old. Her mother committed suicide by over dosing on her medication. When Ellen tried to go look for help for her mother her father stopped her. He told them that if she looked for helped he would kill them both. After her mother died she was left under her fathers custody. Her father was a drunk. He would physically and mentally abuse her. Ellen was forced to pay bills, go grocery shopping, cook for herself, and do everything else for herself. Ellen couldn't take it any more so she ran away her friends house. Starletta and her parents lived in a small cabin with one small bathroom. One day at school a teacher found a bruise on Ellen's arm. She sends Ellen to live with Julia the school's art teacher. Julia had a husband named Roy. They were both hippies. Julia and Roy cared a lot about Ellen. After Ellen turned 11 years old she was forced to go live with her grandmother. Ellen didn't want to leave Julia and Roy but her grandmother had won custody. Her grandmother was a cruel old lady. Ellen spends the summer with her grandmother. Living with her makes her very unhappy. Since her grandmother owns farmland she forces Ellen to work on the field with her black servants. Ellen meets a black woman named Mavis. Mavis and her become good friends. Mavis would talk about how she knew Ellen's mother and how much Ellen resembled her mother. Her grandmother didn't think the same. She thought that Ellen resembled her father. She also hated that man. Her grandmother would often compare her with her father. Her grandmother would torture her because she wanted revenge from her father. Her grandmother also blames her for the death of her mother. While Ellen was staying with her grandmother her father died. When her father died she didn't feel sad because she had always fantasized about killing her father. Ellen just felt a distant sadness. Ellen cried just a little bit. Her grandmother was furious because Ellen showed some emotions. She told her to never cry again. After that Ellen becomes scarred for a long time. One day her uncle Rudolph bought the flag that had been on Ellen's father's casket. Her grandmother turns him away. Later that day she burned the flag.
“Tunnel” by Sarah Ellis is about a sixteen-year old boy who is looking for a job. He gets a job as a babysitter, and has to look after a girl name Elizabeth, Ib for short. Ib and Ken go for an exploration mission, as he calls it, ending up at a recognizable place from Ken's childhood. Ib enters this place, endangers herself, and requires assistance from Ken. Ken and Ib hear voices that will only disappear upon hearing Ken and Ib’s real name. Ken helps Ib, and they leave, trying to forget about the traumatic experience. This story was able to positively depict the elements of a short story through the point of view, theme, and the mood of the story.
In reading Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, two themes took center stage: Memories and Motherhood. As the book unfolds Steedman repeatedly points out that childhood memories are used by individuals for various purposes; rather than objective recollections dominated by facts, she proposes that they are more subjective in nature, likely to alter with time or as circumstances dictate.
This story speaks of a married woman who fell in love with a man who was not her husband. She bore this man a child and realized that she could not live without him. In the event, she decides to leave her husband to be with the child’s father. However, there is only one problem and that is that she has two other children by her husband. She has a daughter who is 9 years old and is very mature for her age, and a darling son who is 5 years old. As she leaves to restart her life again with this other man, the 5 year old son is left behind to stay with his dad, and the little girl is tragically killed by a pack of wolves. The little boy is devastated by his mom’s decision to leave him behind. He is constantly haunted by dreams and images that come to his mind surrounding his mother’s...
Teenage suicide seems to be the underlying tone in this short story. Several signs of a distressed teen are illustrated through the character of Lucy. Usually a teen that commits suicide is one who is admired. The first time Lois meets Lucy, she thought of her as an exception. Lucy says the only reason she is at the same camp as Lois is because her mother went there. Lois immediately feels like Lucy is above this camp but since Lucy is good-natured she will make it work. She thinks about the fact that Lucy had a full time maid while her own family only had someone twice a week. Lucy adores her father and tells Lois about the neat patch over his eye. Lois tries to offer something up about her family that may interest Lucy. She tells Lucy that her father plays golf. Lucy just answers by stating that both her father and mother play golf. These ...
Porter and Welty both provide flashbacks and memories in their stories to help the reader see what Granny and Sister’s lives were like before everything fell apart with their families. Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is packed of the flashbacks and memories of Granny’s past relationships with the only people she loves even though are all dead. She reminisced about her youthful days when she was strong, independent, and with John, the man who stood her up at the altar and died when Granny was young. She still loves him and wants to see him, but “John would be looking for a young woman with the peaked Spanish comb in her hair and the painted fan,” (Porter 81) she believed he would not recognize her. Granny also lost one of her daughters, Hapsy along with her newborn who also died. When Granny brought those memories to the surface a fog of darkness, clouds reality and she gets lost and recalls that, “there was the day, the day, but a whirl of dark smoke rose and covered it, crept up and over into the bright field where everything was planted so c...
The end of child innocence is a significant part of transitioning into young adulthood. This is illustrated in “Marigolds,” a short story written by Eugenia Collier, that takes place in a small town trapped in poverty during the Great Depression. The main character Lizabeth is a fourteen-year-old girl who is playing with her brother and neighborhood friends and just being kids when she simultaneously encounters an experience that teach about compassion, which eventually helps her step into adulthood. Through Lizabeth’s childhood experience, Collier portrays that maturity is based on compassion and overcoming the innocence of childhood.
The Monkey Garden by Sandra Cisneros tells the story of a young girl’s loss of childhood innocence. The story is narrated by a mature woman remembering her initiation into adolescence through the images and events that occurred in an unused neighborhood lot. She is not ready to mature into adolescence and uses her imagination to transform the lot into a fantasy garden--a place where she can hide from the adult world.
“The Pain Tree” written by Olive Senior tells the story of a woman who comes back home after many years and begins to think about her childhood in a new light, which changes much of what she thought she knew of her family and childhood. The story shows the main character, Lorraine, revisiting the memories of her family and the woman who had taken care of her as a child, Larissa. Children mainly focus on the happy memories which may be tied to more important topics that they do not understand until they are older. Most children do not pick up on many of the complicated things happening around them. Lorraine can now see the bigger picture of her relationship with Larissa and how large the divides were between Lorraine’s family and Larissa’s
Certain elements in children’s literature make me feel nostalgic for the past when I lived a more carefree and perhaps careless lifestyle with my eyes and ears wide open. Now, a college student and adult struggling to juggle school, work, and future career planning, I often forget the simple things that brought me pleasure when I was a child. The stresses I have encountered while growing older—taking on added responsibilities and accumulating prejudices—have clouded my childlike, innocent, and fun view of life. This childishness, which was reawakened by reading Charlotte’s Web,“Goblin Market,” and The Secret Garden ,is something I’d like to bring to life again. I miss it, and I’m tired of repressing it just so I can appear to be a mature adult. There are some characteristics in me that were rooted in childhood and still survive to express themselves today, like my love for animals. But these are few. The majority of things I learned, believed, and valued as a child have escaped me and perhaps lie dormant somewhere in my subconscious. My sense of beauty and healing power in nature has diminished since I moved away from my rural childhood home, as well as my relationships with my sisters, who were more easy to get along with when I was young. I regret losing these parts of me with age, and after reading these books I wish more than ever to bring them back, because they did form who I was as a child—and everything stems from childhood. This is when I was my real self, naive at heart and innocent at play.
Jane presents one aspect of woman in The Waking collection (1953): Ross-Bryant views Jane as a young girl who is dead. The poem expresses concern with the coming of death. This poignant elegy is presen...
Although imagery and symbolism does little to help prepare an expected ending in “The Flowers” by Alice Walker, setting is the singular element that clearly reasons out an ending that correlates with the predominant theme of how innocence disappears as a result of facing a grim realism from the cruel world. Despite the joyous atmosphere of an apparently beautiful world of abundant corn and cotton, death and hatred lies on in the woods just beyond the sharecropper cabin. Myop’s flowers are laid down as she blooms into maturity in the face of her fallen kinsman, and the life of summer dies along with her innocence. Grim realism has never been so cruel to the innocent children.
Many of these causes could be prevented fairly easily. If people today would just follow some simple rules, none of these would be as big as they are now.
Hirsch, E. 1995. “Introduction, Landscape: between place and space” in Hirsch, E. (ed.) The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press.