Factory workers, especially immigrant women, often work very hard for little pay. They continue working day to day, performing the same tasks endlessly because they have no choice. Their diligence and hard work is portrayed in the poem “My Mother, Who Came From China Where She Never Saw Snow” by Laureen Mar. In the poem, the author uses punctuation, irony, and imagery to demonstrate the struggle female factory workers must overcome to meet ends need. The author uses sudden periods and commas to create a rhythm, which makes the reader pause. The rhythm of the pauses mimics the rhythm of her sewing, which makes the poem move along with her. The author states “She pushes cloth / through a pounding needle, under, / around, and out, / breaks thread with snap / against fingerbone, tooth” (Lines 12-14). When read aloud, these lines create a pause, which mimics the rhythm of the sewing machine. The sudden pauses in the poem also mimic the assembly line in the factory. The punctuation in the poem also creates an effect on the reader, making them feel as if they were actually on an assembly line. Mar states “Sleeve after sleeve, sleeve. / It is easy. The same piece” (15-16). When read aloud, this creates an effect on the passage to make it seem like the reader is watching an assembly line. The punctuation in the poem ties together to create an effect on the reader, which makes the passage seem like an assembly line, doing the same thing over and over again. The author uses irony in the poem to demonstrate how the female worker in the factory made ski coats, but she will never see snow. The female worker in the factory makes ski coats, but it is ironic that she makes something for which she will never see. Laureen states “She earns money /... ... middle of paper ... ...air to the thread going through the sewing machine and how dirty the factory is. The author uses imagery to show the reader that in factories, people are not seen as human, but as extensions of the machines in the factory. In her poem, “My Mother Who Came From China Where She Never Saw Snow,” Laureen Mar shows the industriousness and great effort of female immigrant factory workers through her use of punctuation, irony and imagery. All of these elements work together to make the reader understand the hardships these women had to endure: making the same items, day after day, for which they will never be able to afford or have any use for. These women make only enough money to survive. Works Cited Mar, Laureen. “My Mother, Who Came From China, Where She Never Saw Snow.” GGCA English. GGCA English, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014
In the book “The Boys of Winter” by Wayne Coffey, shows the struggle of picking the twenty men to go to Lake Placid to play in the 1980 Olympics and compete for the gold medal. Throughout this book Wayne Coffey talks about three many points. The draft and training, the importance of the semi-final game, and the celebration of the gold medal by the support the team got when they got home.
The narrator of the poem is a night waitress, which most likely means she is struggling financially. She has a Slavic heritage, which is revealed to us through this line, “It’s my mother’s Slavic
The two works of literature nudging at the idea of women and their roles as domestic laborers were the works of Zora Neale Hurston in her short story “Sweat”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Whatever the setting may be, whether it is the 1920’s with a woman putting her blood, sweat and tears into her job to provide for herself and her husband, or the 1890’s where a new mother is forced to stay at home and not express herself to her full potential, women have been forced into these boxes of what is and is not acceptable to do as a woman working or living at home. “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” draw attention to suppressing a woman’s freedom to work along with suppressing a woman’s freedom to act upon her
This ESSAY discusses the female Lowell factory worker as portrayed in the Offering. Although the magazine never expressed an overtly feminist view of the factory girls' condition, nor invoked a working-class consciousness similar to later labor expressions in Lowell, there is evidence of a narrative strategy and ideology speaking both to the factory women and the middle-class readership outside of the mill town. The paper's short stories, epistolary narratives and commentaries seek to legitimize an operatives' role within the feminine ideal of domesticity. In conforming to the norms of feminine literature, the Offering reconstructs the operatives' character. It subordinates the evidence for independence or autonomy to relate stories of familial or sentimental ties binding the factory girl to the world outside of factory life. The magazine sought to provide an answer to this question: given her new liberties, what kept the "factory girl" from losing contact with her moral sentiments?
This darkly satiric poem is about cultural imperialism. Dawe uses an extended metaphor: the mother is America and the child represents a younger, developing nation, which is slowly being imbued with American value systems. The figure of a mother becomes synonymous with the United States. Even this most basic of human relationships has been perverted by the consumer culture. The poem begins with the seemingly positive statement of fact 'She loves him ...’. The punctuation however creates a feeling of unease, that all is not as it seems, that there is a subtext that qualifies this apparently natural emotional attachment. From the outset it is established that the child has no real choice, that he must accept the 'beneficence of that motherhood', that the nature of relationships will always be one where the more powerful figure exerts control over the less developed, weaker being. The verb 'beamed' suggests powerful sunlight, the emotional power of the dominant person: the mother. The stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, as if undeniably the child must accept the mother's gift of love. Dawe then moves on to examine the nature of that form of maternal love. The second stanza deals with the way that the mother comforts the child, 'Shoosh ... shoosh ... whenever a vague passing spasm of loss troubles him'. The alliterative description of her 'fat friendly features' suggests comfort and warmth. In this world pain is repressed, real emotion pacified, in order to maintain the illusion that the world is perfect. One must not question the wisdom of the omnipotent mother figure. The phrase 'She loves him...' is repeated. This action of loving is seen as protecting, insulating the child. In much the same way our consumer cultur...
Similarly to the way people hold expectations for the daystar, or sun, to rise every day, mothers are expected to perform their duties like cleaning the house or taking care of the children. Both are taken advantage of and are not fully appreciated until they stop performing their duties. Throughout the poem, the woman’s daughter and husband are given names, “Liza” (line 12) and “Thomas” (line 17) respectively, but not her. The woman is only referred to as “she” or “her” which further highlights the lack of acknowledgement she receives. The mother is taken for granted by her family and is not regarded as important. Her efforts are ignored and she is never thanked for completing her tasks around the house because that is the role she is “supposed” to fulfill.
For many of us growing up, our mothers have been a part of who we are. They have been there when our world was falling apart, when we fell ill to the flu, and most importantly, the one to love us when we needed it the most. In “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, it begins with a brief introduction to one mother’s interpretation of the American Dream. Losing her family in China, she now hopes to recapture part of her loss through her daughter. However, the young girl, Ni Kan, mimics her mother’s dreams and ultimately rebels against them.
There are many policy issues that affect families in today’s society. Hunger is a hidden epidemic and one major issue that American’s still face. It is hard to believe that in this vast, ever growing country, families are still starving. As stated in the book Growing Up Empty, hunger is running wild through urban, rural, and even suburban communities. This paper will explore the differing perspectives of the concerned camp, sanguine camp, and impatient camp. In addition, each camps view, policy agenda, and values that underlie their argument on hunger will be discussed.
Fulfilling the roles of both mother and breadwinner creates an assortment of reactions for the narrator. In the poem’s opening lines, she commences her day in the harried role as a mother, and with “too much to do,” (2) expresses her struggle with balancing priorities. After saying goodbye to her children she rushes out the door, transitioning from both, one role to the next, as well as, one emotion to another. As the day continues, when reflecting on
Young girls were not allowed to open the windows and had to breathe in the dust, deal with the nerve-racking noises of the machines all day, and were expected to continue work even if they 're suffering from a violent headache or toothache (Doc 2). The author of this report is in favor of employing young women since he claimed they seemed happy and they loved their machines so they polished them and tied ribbons on them, but he didn 't consider that they were implemented to make their awful situations more bearable. A woman who worked in both factory and field also stated she preferred working in the field rather than the factory because it was hard work but it never hurt her health (Doc 1), showing how dangerous it was to work in a factory with poor living conditions. Poor living conditions were common for nearly all workers, and similar to what the journalist saw, may have been overlooked due to everyone seeming
In this poem, there is a young woman and her loving mother discussing their heritage through their matrilineal side. The poem itself begins with what she will inherit from each family member starting with her mother. After discussing what she will inherit from each of her family members, the final lines of the poem reflect back to her mother in which she gave her advice on constantly moving and never having a home to call hers. For example, the woman describes how her father will give her “his brown eyes” (Line 7) and how her mother advised her to eat raw deer (Line 40). Perhaps the reader is suggesting that she is the only survivor of a tragedy and it is her heritage that keeps her going to keep safe. In the first two lines of the poem, she explains how the young woman will be taking the lines of her mother’s (Lines 1-2). This demonstrates further that she is physically worried about her features and emotionally worried about taking on the lineage of her heritage. Later, she remembered the years of when her mother baked the most wonderful food and did not want to forget the “smell of baking bread [that warmed] fined hairs in my nostrils” (Lines 3-4). Perhaps the young woman implies that she is restrained through her heritage to effectively move forward and become who she would like to be. When reading this poem, Native American heritage is an apparent theme through the lifestyle examples, the fact lineage is passed through woman, and problems Native Americans had faced while trying to be conquested by Americans. Overall, this poem portrays a confined, young woman trying to overcome her current obstacles in life by accepting her heritage and pursuing through her
America was not everything the mothers had expected for their daughters. The mothers always wanted to give their daughters the feather to tell of their hardships, but they never could. They wanted to wait until the day that they could speak perfect American English. However, they never learned to speak their language, which prevented them from communicating with their daughters. All the mothers in The Joy Luck Club had so much hope for their daughters in America, but instead their lives ended up mirroring their mother’s life in China. All the relationships had many hardships because of miscommunication from their different cultures. As they grew older the children realized that their ...
From the child in Omelas to a slaving factory worker, those who struggle from oppression have channeled their worth and refuse to remain pushed to the side and neglected.
“Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. She tested our strengths to establish realities”(5). In the book “The Woman Warrior,” Maxine Kingston is most interested in finding out about Chinese culture and history and relating them to her emerging American sense of self. One of the main ways she does so is listening to her mother’s talk-stories about the family’s Chinese past and applying them to her life.
From a scholarly point of view, the film accurately depicts the lifestyle of a factory worker in the timeframe. Workers would stand on an assembly line and repeat the same action day in and day out. The film also depicts the transition of the human dependency of machines very well. The workers would work at the pace of the machines. The film also had metaphors of humans being controlled by machines when the main actor was sucked into the pulley system of a machine. The film also has a scene where there is a machine that automatically feeds humans.