How would you feel if everything you grew up learning turned out to be different? Everything you thought you knew was not actually reality? You would probably feel like the entire world has spun around and hit you with a change you were not comfortable with. That is what Margaret Atwood felt like in her story “Great Aunts”. Growing up Margaret was told many interesting and intriguing stories explaining who her Great Aunts and other family members were. During the evening, after dinner, her mother would sit down and read out the letters that her two sisters would send from “home”. Until one day, her grandfather had a coronary (more than one) and could die at any moment, so her and her family went to Nova Scotia to visit them. It was a long
The Changeable nature of life affects us all somehow. Whether it be moving to a new city, having children, or losing people that we love, it can affect people in many different ways. For example, in the novel, the main character Taylor Greer changes her name from Marietta and moves...
It has changed from feeling sorry for this woman to thinking she is going to murder someone. Near the end of the story, after describing Miss Emily’s life, Faulkner catches up to the present day where Miss Emily has died. He explains how Emily’s cousins came once they heard of her death and buried her. The cousins all walked into Miss Emily’s room, which greeted them with a bitter smell.
After five years of being raised and living with their grandmother whom they truly loved, the girls had a rude awakening. Their grandmother, Sylvia had passed away. “When after almost five years, my grandmother one winter morning eschewed awakening, Lily and Nona were fetched from Spokane and took up housekeeping in Fingerbone, just as my grandmother had wished” (Robinson 29). This was the final attempt that their grandmother had made in order for the girls to have a normal and traditional life. This is a solid example of how the sister’s lives are shaped by their family and their surroundings. Lucille’s ultimate concern in life is to conform to society and live a traditional life. She wishes to have a normal family and is sorrowful for all of the losses that she has experienced such as her mother’s and grandmother’s deaths. On the other hand, Ruthie, after spending more time with her future guardian, Aunt Sylvie, becomes quite the transient like her.
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...
I looked around at everyone in the room and saw the sorrow in their eyes. My eyes first fell on my grandmother, usually the beacon of strength in our family. My grandmother looked as if she had been crying for a very long period of time. Her face looked more wrinkled than before underneath the wild, white hair atop her head. The face of this once youthful person now looked like a grape that had been dried in the sun to become a raisin. Her hair looked like it had not been brushed since the previous day as if created from high wispy clouds on a bright sunny day.
Any story that begins with a mother fantasizing about reuniting with her daughter on T. V talk show is going to have something to tell us about their family. Probably a lot to tell us in fact. As the narrator herself points out, though, there’s a lot that television wouldn’t be able to show the family members and their complex relationships to one another in this story. The conflict, in fact, concerns competing ideas about what tradition (or heritage) even means. In a classic rock song, the Rolling Stones sing, “you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.” In this paper, I’m going to relate this quote to my own personal experiences. I’m going to closely analyze the two sisters, Maggie,
Understanding how this world truly functions is easy to lose its scope. Many can only tell of how he or she came to realize it through his or her own life. In Dorothy Allison’s case, she was abused and raped by her own father. It is because of this that she finds herself standoffish with men. When she writes about her life and reaches her conclusions of harsh realities, who is to tell her she is wrong? Who can possibly stare her in the face and say, “You have it all wrong.” Is it even plausible to consider telling her that the majority of people never experience anything like that; therefore, the world is not such a horrible thing? How would she react? One could argue that it makes the world that much worse; not because she had it so bad, but because the rest of so...
Mom and Dad stayed in the room with the upstairs fireplace and a covered porch facing Alexandria Bay, but Mom’s true niche was the front porch. I wonder now if a plaque should be placed there in her memory. She was content to sit and read for hours, all the while keeping track of who was coming or going and in which direction.
Her parents meet at a social gathering in town and where married shortly thereafter. Marie’s name was chosen by her grandmother and mother, “because they loved to read the list was quite long with much debate over each name.” If she was a boy her name would have been Francis, so she is very happy to have born a girl. Marie’s great uncle was a physician and delivered her in the local hospital. Her mother, was a housewife, as was the norm in those days and her father ran his own business. Her mother was very close with her parents, two brothers, and two sisters. When her grandmother was diagnosed with asthma the family had to move. In those days a warm and dry climate was recommended, Arizona was the chosen state. Because her grandma could never quite leave home, KY, the family made many trips between the states. These trips back and forth dominated Marie’s childhood with her uncles and aunts being her childhood playmates.
In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the Finches strongly influenced Aunt Alexandra when she visited their home. By the end of the book, Aunt Alexandra was almost a completely different person because of her stay at the Finches. The whole reason for her visit was to change Scout, but instead she got changed herself. This was not what was meant to happen, but it did. This sort of thing happens in many families, as well. A family member come to change someone else, but ends up get changed instead. The ironic part of this is that when it happen, the family member who is changed, usually get positively influenced. In more cases than not, positive influence comes to people who strived to change the personality of others.
Regretfully, though readers can see how Mama has had a difficult time in being a single mother and raising two daughters, Dee, the oldest daughter, refuses to acknowledge this. For she instead hold the misconception that heritage is simply material or rather artificial and does not lie in ones heart. However, from Mama’s narrations, readers are aware that this cultural tradition does lie within ones heart, especially those of Mama’s and Maggie’s, and that it is the pure foundation over any external definition.
If someone were to look through the Fitzsimmon’s scrapbook and see Annie’s written accounts, they would see a family who went through many hardships while immigrating to America. They would also see how important it was to have family to help them in a time of need.
Nikki Giovanni and Linda Hogan both wrote poems in the 1970s about their grandmothers that seem totally different to the unaware reader. In actuality, they are very similar. These two poems, Legacies and Heritage, express the poet’s value of knowledge passed down from grandmother to granddaughter, from generation to generation. Even though the poems are composed and read very differently, the underlying message conveyed is the same, and each are valid first-hand accounts of legacies and heritages.
Nancy was only four years old when her grandmother died. Her grandmother had a big lump on the lower right hand side of her back. The doctors removed it, but it was too late. The tumor had already spread throughout her body. Instead of having a lump on her back, she had a long stitched up incision there. She couldn’t move around; Nancy’s parents had to help her go to the bathroom and do all the simple things that she use to do all by herself. Nancy would ask her grandmother to get up to take her younger sister, Linh, and herself outside so they could play. She never got up. A couple of months later, an ambulance came by their house and took their grandmother away. That was the last time Nancy ever saw her alive. She was in the hospital for about a week and a half. Nancy’s parents never took them to see her. One day, Nancy saw her parents crying and she have never seen them cry before. They dropped Linh and her off at one of their friend’s house. Nancy got mad because she thought they were going shopping and didn’t take her with them.
"Her grandmother, whom she such admired, was a keen storyteller and succeeded in getting her to recognize storytelling as an important cultural event. She was fortunate in her early years to attend schools which paid a lot of attent...