Plainsong tells of a small town through the eyes of a half-dozen residents, interweaving their viewpoints and lives together. One of the viewpoints are the Mcpheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, who eventually emerge as the heart of this novel and a literary gem. They are two shy elderly bachelor farmers who perceive the raising of cattle as an analogy for human existence. Their parents died at a young age and ever since they have spent their lives on a farm isolated from others. However, this changes as Victoria Roubideaux is introduced into their lives by Maggie Jones. Amazingly, they agree to take under their roof, a young pregnant girl who has neither resources nor options to solve the problem of where to stay during her pregnancy. The two did not know anything about women, babies, or kids for that matter. As the shrewd right-handed urging of Maggie Jones goads them out of their work-bound isolation to step beyond their set ways. The elderly bachelor farmers who show a resilience and courage to grow and learn new things at a time in life when most people are content to withdraw.
Until now, the older men did not grow up with the social graces that would have put them in situations leading to more relationships. After having Victoria living with Maggie for the time being, it became troublesome for her elder father. Then she contacted the Mcpherons to see if they would accept her offer and allow this young girl into their home. At first they were reluctant to the proposal, but Maggie pushed them to overcome this fear. The source of this unwillingness came from that they never had to interact with anyone else, especially women. The only thing they have done is farming, and that's all they had to know up till now. Now they were forced to venture out of their habitual ways and accommodate another person. When she moved in they were very concerned with her situation, but more with how to connect with her on a new level that is one that they had never experienced. They found this very difficult due to their lack of social skills and their inexperience on how to talk to a teenager as well as in changing their many decade long customs of their everyday life. Most of all they were very generous in changing their lives for this girl.
He is joined by Amy, the wife of a local farmer; her husband Billy; their son Isaac; and the deputy, Bobby, in revealing the tale of the Jocassee community and its people. The story encompasses twenty years in the Jocassee neighborhood and along with the narrators other characters important to the story are introduced to the reader. Widow Glendower is one of those characters. Widow Glendower is perceived by some in the valley to be a witchy woman. She is a midwife to many in the community, a doctor for their illnesses, and a seer of things to come.
The story is center around a small cast. In it Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Joy, who had her name changed to Hulga, live on a farm with their tenants Mrs. Freeman’s and her two daughters- Glynese and Carramae. Interestingly, Mrs. Hopewell calls the Freeman Girls, Glycerin and Caramel while refusing to call her own daughter anything but Joy. “Good County People”, is told through the interactions of this dysfunctional gaggle of ladies, and their chance encounter with the Bible selling con-artist Manley Pointer. It is a story of a few not so, “Good Country People.”
The statement, “She had telephoned the man whose name they had given as a reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good farmer but that his wife was the noisiest woman ever to walk the earth” suggests, when the term farmer is used, that this story takes place in a farm town. Also the way Mom describes herself can lead the reader to think that she works on a farm herself. She says, “I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man” (744). From the way she describes her working hands to explaining how she slaughtered a cow, the reader understands that she has a farm that they live on and is an extremely hard worker. The setting in these stories are used in a way that impact the theme tremendously because the individuals who go to college are both from small rural communities where opportunities like this do not happen very often especially during this time, which is probably around the mid to late 1950s and 1960s. While, in the story “Good Country People”, a comment is made about the make of a car when the author notes that, “She said he owned a ’55 Mercury but that Glynese said she would rather marry a man with only a ’36 Plymouth who would be married by a preacher” (195). This statement can indicate that the time frame that ”Good Country People” happens in is around 1955 because the way it is talked about the older
Plot Summary: A man, Tom Joad, is released from prison and returns home to find his family’s farm and all other nearby farms deserted. After finding his family he finds out they are planning to travel west to try to earn money picking fruit in California. It is a long and challenging road to travel in a weak, old pickup truck, for both Grampa Joad and a woman by the name of Sairy Wilson cannot complete the journey. California is not all the glamour they had expected because California has an enormous shortage of jobs. To make matters worse, Granma Joad dies. The family moves around looking for work, and unfortunately two of the older boys abandon the family out of frustra...
...rs, '?was one of the most toughing exuberant, cleverly crafted and utterly entrancing plays?';(Cover The Rez Sisters.) Tomson Highway did a great job at giving the reader an idea of what reserve life is about. He gave us the opportunity to experience the hardships of native people and some insight to how they form their identity.
John Steinbeck, the author of many books including The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, writes the book The Pastures of Heaven. This book describes the lives of multiple families and life in a town called the Pastures of Heaven. One family in particular, the Munroe’s, seems to be involved in all families living on the Pastures of Heaven. The Munroe family serves as a dramatic foil character to the rest of the families since, wherever they are, the lovely Pastures of Heaven turn into chaos.
For many years, women have strived for gaining equality with men. They have been held back and their opportunities taken away from them because of the fact that they were women. There is also, generalized in western cultures, a stereotype that women are fragile and should be more dedicated to maintaining the home, doing feminine things, that they shouldn 't work, and be discouraged from intellectual thinking. In the Victorian period (1837-1901) aside from women 's suffragette movements the Victorian woman usually upheld this stereotype of a well-behaved wife, more or less a possession then an individual. However, there were a few who defied the odds and took it to heart
The external changes, The Great Depression and the Dustbowl, affected the Joads economically and emotionally. By economic standards the Joads were poor before the Dust Bowl. However, they believed they had economic value and importance by working their own 40 acres of land. “Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away. And Pa was born here… Then a bad year came and he had to borrow a little money. An’ we was born here. And Pa had to borrow money. The bank owned the land then, but we stayed and we got a little bit of what we raised”(Steinbeck 45). Losing the farm, being forced to leave their home in a search of work, meant the loss of their social values. To the Joads, value and life importance rest in working the land and this ideology of the past made their emotional adjustment to being a wondering, an “Okie,” even more difficult. "The moving, questing people were migrants now. Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who had lived and died on forty acres, had now the whole West to rove in. And they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people.
I read the book Lonesome Howl, which is a drama book and a love story. The book was about two main character whose names are Jake and Lucy. They lived with their family in two different farms, but in the same community besides a mountain covered in a big wicked forest where many rumors took place. The farmers around the place lost many sheep’s since a feral beast. It was a quite small community and a lot of tales was told about it to make it even more interesting. Lucy was 16 years old and lived with her strict father and a coward of mom who didn’t dare to stand up for her daughter when she were being mistreated and slapped around by her father. Lucy was a retired and quite teenager because of that. She had a younger brother whose name was Peter. Peter was being bullied in school and couldn’t read since the education of Peter was different compare too Lucy’s. She helped him in school and stood up for the mean bullies, although all she got in return was him talking bullshit about her with their cruel dad which resulted with her getting thrash.
As they are on the road heading towards California, they notice that grandpa’s health is declining terribly. As they are on the long road to California from their Oklahoma farm, they keep close eyes on Grandpa’s health, when they get to a place where they can rest and take a break, tom breaks his probation terms and becomes illegal to be with them, and then Grampa Joad passes away in the middle of the night (“Grapes”). As they lose one family member, they realize the reason he had died was the medication they gave him, so that they could began on their journey to California to live a better life.
In “The Farmer’s Children,” Elizabeth Bishop uses different literary techniques to portray her theme. “The Farmer’s Children” tells the story of two young brothers, Cato and Emerson, who have to sleep in the cold in their father’s barn in order to protect the tools inside. These brothers also have to endure parental neglect from their stepmother and father which causes them to freeze to death in the barn. One technique that is used by Bishop is the characterization of the parents. In addition, Bishop uses an allusion, which is a reference to a work of art in another work of art, and symbolism to further show how the characterization of the parents affected the two brothers. In “The Farmer’s Children,” Bishop uses the characterization of the parents of Cato and Emerson, the allusion to “Hansel and Grethel,” and the symbolism of the stepmother’s snowflake quilt to portray the theme of how parental neglect can lead to negative consequences.
We know everything, from where Ma Joad keeps her letters, news clippings, and trinkets, to the precise part that is expected to settle the Wilson 's visiting auto. Actually, Steinbeck is so great at being exact that when we complete The Grapes of Wrath, we 've earned our PhDs in the specialty of auto workman repair. His parts that treat the Joad family are brimming with vivacious, bright dialog that nearly approximates the sound and rhythms of the Oklahoma discourse designs. We sense that we are in that spot, going nearby the Joads. Steinbeck blends his parts about the Joads with sections that investigate the life and times of the Dust Bowl through a wide, recorded lens. These sections have a tendency to accept a continuous flow, as it delineates banks expelling sharecroppers, degenerate auto sales people offering broken-down autos for an excessive amount of cash, and even the very clean storms that destroy the area. In these occasions, Steinbeck uses bunches of reiteration, making the dialect appear to be just about dreamlike and underscoring the urgent times of the Dust Bowl
The book, Grapes of Wrath, follows the life of the Joad family, who live in Oklahoma during the Depression. The story begins with the return of Tom Joad from prison, where he has spent the last few years. He killed a boy in a bar fight and is now on parole. He is taken by surprise when he returns to Oklahoma only to find that his house is in ruins and his family is not there. He doesn’t know that, while he was gone, the banks forced his family and thousands of others off their land. Tom is accompanied by a former priest, Casey, who searches with Tom for his family. Tom and Casey find the Joad family at Tom’s uncle’s house. The family is preparing to move west to California in hopes that they will find jobs and escape the Dust Bowl drought. The Dust Bowl drought has killed all the farmer’s crops and the land has lost it’s richness. Tom decides to travel with his family, even though he’s going against parole rules by leaving the state.
The three Smales children, Victor, Royce and Gina, had not experienced, and therefore had not expected to live a life of luxury amongst people of their “own” kind. This innocence contributes greatly to the rate and comfort in which they adjust to living in July’s village. Bam and Maureen may not have felt prejudice towards the black race, but were certainly prejudice about the lifestyle in which they must now live, a lifestyle completely stripped of any and all luxuries they once enjoyed. All of the family members, facing a new way of life, adjust to their situation in radically different ways. Each one drifts in their own direction in search of comfort and acceptance throughout their experiences living amongst July’s people.
Jackson starts by describing the day and how beautiful it is “the morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green” (1). Leading into the first paragraph the reader is not sure what the story is about but that it is a beautiful summer day. Jackson then introduces the groups of characters, “the children assemble first, of course” (1). She further explained that the children were recently out of school for the summer. The children were still talking about school and were beginning to play. Then there is mention that the boys are collecting rocks placing them into piles or stuffing them into their pockets “Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones” (1). There is no mention why the boys are filling their pockets or even why they are making piles; allowing the reader to believe that they are just being boys playing with rocks. The men of the village enter next, “surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes” (1). Jackson also states that the men stood away from the pile of stones. Showing some significance but not explaining why. The women enter and some gossip is exchanged but mainly they join their husbands. When this happens the children are called over “the ...