The Webster Dictionary defines naïve as having or expressing innocence and credulity. Alice Munro introduces her fictional character Edie who portrays the true definition of naïve in her short story “How I Met My Husband.” The protagonist is a young girl, Edie, who is hired help for the Peebles’s family. One afternoon she meets Chris Watters, a pilot who travels from town to town giving plane rides for a fee. Edie fall in love with him, but soon learns of his engagement to another woman, Alice Kelling. One afternoon Edie goes to visit Chris and talk to him. He revels to her his plans to leave town, but promise to write her. Edie waits day after day for his letter, which never comes. Edie realizes this and marries the mailman, who believes that she waited by the mailbox for him every day, although Edie never tells him that she had waited for Chris because she likes "for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy. (Munro 214)” By using the first person point of view, Munro revels Edie’s innocence towards romance and maturity for her age. Through the emotion portrayed in Munro’s short story told through the wiser and older Edie as she looks back on her young self then. The short story shows strength and real life disappointment’s and communicates the theme with the old saying “when one door closes, another one opens. (Alexander Graham Bell)”
By the older Edie sharing her thought and emotions about her younger self, the reader see’s that Edie shows innocence towards romance and maturity for her age as she is living in a world were she did not grow up in as she works for Peebles’s. The first clue the reader sees in the story that Edie has no real conceptions on love or lust is when she meets Chris Watters for the first ti...
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...lf then. The short story shows strength and real life disappointments. The fact is that there are many Edie’s in our world who sit by the mailbox and wait for letters that may or may not come. The heartbreak Edie felt towards Chris Watters led her to meet the real man she was meant to marry.
Work Cited
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...: ‘Refreshingly Feminist,’ Lacks Heart”. (The Jezebel review also provided a list of other sources for reviews. It was very helpful in preparing this piece.) http://jezebel.com/5486801/alice-in-wonderland-refreshingly-feminist-lacks-heart
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Dorothea Brooke is a very bright and beautiful young lady that does not much care for frills or getting ahead in society. She wants more than anything to help those around her, starting with the tenants of her uncle. She desires to redesign their cottages, but Arthur Brooke, her elderly uncle with whom she and her younger sister Celia Brooke lives with, does not want to spend the money required. So Dorothea shares her dream with Sir James Chettam, who finds her fascinating, and encourages her to use the plans she has drawn up for the tenants on his land instead. He falls in love with her, but does not share his feelings for her quickly enough. Edward Casaubon, an older scholarly clergyman asks Dorothea to marry him, she does not accept until she finds out Sir James means to seriously court her, then turns around and tells Casaubon yes. What she does not te...
In the short story, “Adventure”, Alice Hindman lives a life full of illusions and loneliness. Alice is a very quiet person on the exterior while a passion boils underneath. Alice Hindman is limited by life denying truths and guilty of allowing them to run her life. She believes in love and tradition absolutely. Alice’s blindness to the changing social mores limits her capacity to progress forward in life. She become consumed instead by the idea of herself and her memories. “It is not going to come to me. I will never find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?” (Anderson 117). If she cannot have Ned, she will have no other.
1) O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Women Writers: Text & Contexts Series). Rutgers University Press, 1993.
Through her three marriages, the death of her one true love, and proving her innocence in Tea Cake’s death, Janie learns to look within herself to find her hidden voice. Growing as a person from the many obstacles she has overcome during her forty years of life, Janie finally speaks her thoughts, feelings and opinions. From this, she finds what she has been searching for her whole life, happiness.
Munro, Alice. “Floating Bridge.” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2002. Print.
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i Fitzhenry, R. I. (ed.). Barnes & Noble Book of Quotations, New York, Barnes & Noble Books, 1986, 197.
Munro, Alice. "How I Met My Husband." Perrine's Literature : Structure, Sound, and Sense. By Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Boston: Heinle, 2008. 125-140.
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