A short story “Mines” by Susan Straight will be examined. Inmates, wards, fools, children, many names to describe young ill directed souls who find themselves confined at the local Youth Correctional Facility. It is a place as cold as a stone and depressing for Clarette. The facility is a place where kids who mess up in life go to serve time and most likely, if their paths stay the same, will end up across the street at the Chino men's facility. Clarette is a guard at the correctional center; she also has a nephew, Alfonso at the Youth Facility as well. Clarette tries to keep distinction between her job and family life. My first thought while reading the story is that is life. I connected to this story, because the events that take place are events from our current time and we hear and see news every day as it pertains to gangs and their rituals. Susan Straight wrote the story in 2002, with a general setting, which could have taken any place in any town. A woman, Clarette, who works at the Youth Correctional Facility, is trying to keep up her life as a single parent and a full-time correctional officer. Clarette, is a very round character and switches personalities between that of a mother and a correctional facility guard though out the story. As a mother, she sees our young men wasting away in such a mindless place, where these kids often fight, sending emotional pain to her already struggling life. As she battles not only with her own everyday life situations that arise while having a family, she also has to go to work and witness, her own nephew and his stupidity which got him a sentence inside the facility. There are great visualizations from Ms. Straight, about her characters in this story. Her descriptions are real ... ... middle of paper ... ...ut work’s drudgery dragging her backwards and affecting her children’s lives. Clarette is like a lot of working women in our society. The battle to raise her children in an ever-changing environment for the worse, leads her to work a job she is not extremely happy with to survive. She visualizes keeping her family strong, educated but not tough and institutionalized. Clarette has to transform from a guard to a nurturing mother each time she comes from or goes to work. The working single mother in a world of struggle. Work Cited Biography. jrank.org. Straight-Susan. 4769. web. Straight, Susan. “Mines.” In The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 107- 119. Print. Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2010. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2010. 1. W
Gale, a.k.a. Gale, 1999. Biography in the Context. Web. May 7, 2014.
A Stolen Life by Jaycee Lee Dugard is an autobiography recounting the chilling memories that make up the author’s past. She abducted when she was eleven years old by a man named Phillip Garrido with the help of his wife Nancy. “I was kept in a backyard and not allowed to say my own name,” (Dugard ix). She began her life relatively normally. She had a wonderful loving mother, a beautiful baby sister,, and some really good friends at school. Her outlook on life was bright until June 10th, 1991, the day of her abduction. The story was published a little while after her liberation from the backyard nightmare. She attended multiple therapy sessions to help her cope before she had the courage to share her amazing story. For example she says, “My growth has not been an overnight phenomenon…it has slowly and surely come about,” (D 261). She finally began to put the pieces of her life back together and decided to go a leap further and reach out to other families in similar situations. She has founded the J A Y C Foundation or Just Ask Yourself to Care. One of her goals was, amazingly, to ensure that other families have the help that they need. Another motive for writing the book may have also been to become a concrete form of closure for Miss Dugard and her family. It shows her amazing recovery while also retelling of all of the hardships she had to endure and overcome. She also writes the memoir in a very powerful and curious way. She writes with very simple language and sentence structures. This becomes a constant reminder for the reader that she was a very young girl when she was taken. She was stripped of the knowledge many people take for granted. She writes for her last level of education. She also describes all of the even...
A connection can be drawn among the stories listed above regarding women who live as prisoners. Beatrice, of Rappaccini's Daughter, is confined to a garden because of her father's love of science, and she becomes the pawn to several men's egos. The woman of The Yellow Wallpaper is trapped by her own family's idea of how she should conduct herself, because her mood and habit of writing are not "normal" to them. Sethe, of Beloved, carries the burden of her past and also the past of all slaves. She is unwelcome in her community and a prisoner in her own home, where she is forced to confront these memories of slavery. All three of these women are viewed by society as crazy, evil, or both. The "prisons" in which these women live are constructed by their family, their history, or even themselves.
Clare longs to be part of the black community again and throughout the book tries to integrate herself back into it while remaining part of white society. Although her mother is black, Clare has managed to pass as a white woman and gain the privileges that being a person of white skin color attains in her society. However whenever Clare is amongst black people, she has a sense of freedom she does not feel when within the white community. She feels a sense of community with them and feels integrated rather than isolated. When Clare visits Irene she mentions, “For I am lonely, so lonely… cannot help to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; you can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I o...
The authors begin the book by providing advice on how a convict can prepare for release from prison. Throughout the book, the authors utilize two fictional characters, Joe and Jill Convict, as examples of prisoners reentering society. These fictional characters are representative of America’s prisoners. Prison is an artificial world with a very different social system than the real world beyond bars. Convicts follow the same daily schedule and are shaped by the different society that is prison. Prisoners therefore forget many of the obl...
Jokinen, Anniina. "Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature." Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. N.p., 1996. Web. 9 Nov. 2013. http://www.luminarium.org/
Coyne uses paradigms within the text to describe the horrible situation in a maximum security federal prison. In “The Long Goodbye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”, she describes maximum security as “Pit of fire…Pit of fire straight from Hell. Never seen anything like it. Like something out of an old movie about prisoners…Women die there.” (61). Using this paradigm draws the reader in and gives him or her a far fetched example of what maximum security federal prisons are like. Amanda Coyne backs up her claim with many examples of women in the federal prison who are there for sentences that seem frankly extreme and should not be so harsh. For example, in “The Long Goodbye” Mother’s Day in Federal Prison” we learn about a woman named Stephanie. The text states that Stephanie is a “twenty-four-year-old blonde with Dorothy Hamill hair
Marie, who is a product of an abusive family, is influenced by her past, as she perceives the relationship between Callie and her son, Bo. Saunders writes, describing Marie’s childhood experiences, “At least she’d [Marie] never locked on of them [her children] in a closet while entertaining a literal gravedigger in the parlor” (174). Marie’s mother did not embody the traditional traits of a maternal fig...
Once Olivia receives help, it is perhaps too late. In her senior year, she is sentenced to a juvenile camp, and is clearly out of place. “She is so different from the other girls (pg.312)”, her therapist says. “She was one of the rare kids we see who is focused on her future. I wish I could have started with her when she was twelve or thirteen (pg.312).” Olivia’s case illustrates a system that rather than providing guidance and support to abandoned children, it leads them into a criminal world.
Erin G., 2010, A Woman Doing Life: Notes from a Prison for Women: The Southwest Journal of Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. vi, 202, Vol. 8(2)175.
To conclude, the characters Jeannette Walls and Melba Patillo display both similar and different characteristics. The traits that they retain effected their stories in many ways, and ultimately determined the outcome of them. Since Jeannette showed ambition towards her future, it lead her to become successful, making the story end positive. As for Melba, her courageousness and determination towards ending segregation created an inspirtational environment to readers. Overall, the characteristics of a character can create vivid images for readers, making reading an interesting experience.
Erin George’s A Woman Doing Life: Notes from a Prison for Women sheds light on her life at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women (FCCW) where she was sentenced for the rest of her life for first-degree murder. It is one of the few books that take the reader on a journey of a lifer, from the day of sentencing to the day of hoping to being bunked adjacent to her best friend in the geriatric ward.
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
Detroit: Gale Books, 2007. Literature Resource Center -. Web. The Web. The Web.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.