Mothers and fathers have the potential to provide their offspring with powerful, enduring models of behavior, and exert a continuing influence on the reactions and decisions which will shape their children’s’ lives. It is evident that this can be the case even in the absence of the parent. The mother or father who has died or moved away from the family home does not thereby become absent from the child’s memory, and does not thereby cease to guide the child’s behavior. These truths are illustrated by two books which deal with problems faced by adolescents, and which offer contrasting accounts of parental influence – in one case almost wholly negative; in the other case strongly positive, although not necessarily leading to good solutions to the difficulties confronted.
Jean Hegland’s curious future fantasy Into the Forest challenges the reader. It confronts two teenage girls, Nell and Eva, with an extraordinary series of catastrophes, and yet seems to seek a positive message in the courageous and almost implausibly stoic way in which they deal with isolation, near-starvation, rape and death. Hegland relies in part on the behavioral models presented by the girls’ parents, first present and then absent, to explain their exceptional ability to survive conditions of life, which most people would find intolerable.
Tobias Wolff’s memoir, This Boy’s Life, is filled with colorful characters and comic incident, and yet has a more grounded and realistic tone than Hegland’s tale. The author, as a young boy and then a teenager, shares none of the bravery and moral fiber of Hegland’s Nell and Eva. In fact, his behavior is problematic throughout the narrative. The parental context for young Toby is a shattered one; a struggling mother paired ...
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...by turns up at the paternal home near the conclusion of the story. It can hardly be denied, however, that his pure absence affects Toby’s life, if only by creating the space for the destructive father figures who replace him. Toby’s mother, while constantly present, might easily be absent for all the influence she has on the boy. In Into the Forest, the models of behavior provided by Nell and Eva’s parents, who linger influentially after their deaths, are powerful in shaping the girls’ reactions and decisions. The reader is left in some doubt, however, whether the final decision, to retreat into the trees – to “enter the forest for good” (241) – is either wise or realistic.
Works Cited
Hegland, Jean. Into the Forest: a Novel. New York: Bantam, 1998. Print.
Wolff, Tobias. This Boy's Life: a Memoir. New York: Grove, 1989. Print.
In 1886, author Sarah Orne Jewett wrote a short story “A White Heron.” The premise of the story revolves around a young girl, Sylvia, who is uprooted from her home in the city and taken by her grandmother, Mrs. Tilley, to live out in the middle of a forested, country culture. Sylvia, a nine year old girl, is quiet and shy but goes about business of caring for the family cow where life was so different from the “crowded, manufacturing town”(p.1598) she came from. For the first time in her short life Sylvia understood what it truly felt like to be alive. It is important to understand Sylvia’s character to truly understand the significance of the tree and Sylvia climbing to the top. Personal growth and maturity is an expectation of living but getting the opportunity to experience it in the country, on a farm, is paramount to the changes Sylvia experiences.
“The Pain Tree” written by Olive Senior tells the story of a woman who comes back home after many years and begins to think about her childhood in a new light, which changes much of what she thought she knew of her family and childhood. The story shows the main character, Lorraine, revisiting the memories of her family and the woman who had taken care of her as a child, Larissa. Children mainly focus on the happy memories which may be tied to more important topics that they do not understand until they are older. Most children do not pick up on many of the complicated things happening around them. Lorraine can now see the bigger picture of her relationship with Larissa and how large the divides were between Lorraine’s family and Larissa’s
When two people decide to have a child, either knowingly or unknowingly, they make a vow to raise that child to the best of their abilities. While some parents are wonderful, loving, proud parents some are hurtful, abusive both physically or mentally, or just down right evil the impact they have is immense and will determine many aspects of the child and the way he/she lives out the rest of his/her life. In my life I have both kinds of parents, my mother is the most caring, loving, proud parent I know; while my father is very abusive and hateful towards me and this has had a tremendous effect on me.
Two forlorn leaves cling to the highest branch of a great oak as winter approaches. Nearly all of the others have fallen, and the second leaf wonders if “we know anything about ourselves when we're down there” (Salten 105). Both know that their time on the branch grows short. The first comforts its friend with recollections of warm summer breezes and the promise that many leaves will come after them, and then, still more. The first leaf is troubled itself now, and gently tells her friend to say no more for a while. After several hours of silence, a cold wind gusts, and the second leaf is torn from the branch, just as she began to speak, leaving the first alone in the cold and dark, with no one to comfort or be comforted by (Salten 105-110).
Arsila and Chu’a rushed into their hut. They lived in a small village in modern-day Maryland just around the time, when pilgrims were just beginning to reach American. These two siblings both knew they were not allowed outside once the light leaves the sky. “Where have you two been?” exclaimed their mother. “Sorry mom, we were just out exploring,” claimed Chu’a. “Well I sure hope you two were not getting into any trouble, and most of all I hope you were not anywhere near the forbidden forest,” said their mother. The forbidden forest was located in a remote part of the village, and as far as the villagers knew no one had ever come out alive. “Of course mama,” cried Arsila. Arsila was the angel child. She was her mother’s favorite because of her carefulness and sympathy for others. On the other hand, Chu’a was a wild child who loved to explore everywhere he could and his mother know she would only be able to keep him away from that forest for so long.
Parent/Child relationships are very hard to establish among individuals. This particular relationship is very important for the child from birth because it helps the child to be able to understand moral and values of life that should be taught by the parent(s). In the short story “Teenage Wasteland”, Daisy (mother) fails to provide the proper love and care that should be given to her children. Daisy is an unfit parent that allows herself to manipulated by lacking self confidence, communication, and patience.
Joel Knox, a young boy off to meet his father for the first time and encounters some really interesting people on his way and while there. The theme Coming of age is presented in the novel as Joel establishes a relationship with his stepmother’s cross dressing homosexual cousin Randolph and realizes that he too is homosexual. The relationship that he forms with Randolph is an important relationship Joel has while living with his father. It is a relationship that he longed to have with his father but unfor...
The boy appears to play the role of the responsible adult more so than the father does. The boy has typical signs of a child from today’s broken family relationships; he does not want to disappoint either parent. The boy s...
A lovely tranquil story of a child getting manipulated pushed onto the path of murder, caused by an all-knowing supernatural being. Taking place in the woods, the woods a desolate and hopeless void, as Goethe puts it, “a young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny's house but this light admits of no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems.” Although receiving a warning early on the child still enters the woods, the Erl-King lures them an irresistible temptation that draws them in. The child trusts the Erl-King and even goes into their house, as she puts it, “the room is musical and aromatic and there is always a wood fire crackling in the grate, a sweet, acrid smoke, a bright, glancing flame.” The Erl-King strips her of her clothing, “skin the rabbit,” making love to him.
“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version”(1), McCourt writes as he begins to describe the world in which he grows up. For he creates a separate world for himself, where people he knows wander in and out whenever they can hold his attention. McCourt’s world serves as a coping mechanism as well as an expression of his creativity. He surrounds himself with the depressing truth about his home and family, but brings in each morsel of truth with his own explanation, often humorous, thus exposing himself only to his interpretation of reality. McCourt’s task is to contain his world in the four hundred sixty pages of the book and to have the reader immersed by the end of the first chapter. The opening pages provide a foundation for McCourt, himself, and for his perception, enabling the reader to follow his stream-of-consciousness sentences throughout the book. He gives a flash preview of the book’s content on the first page, giving the reader an idea of what he is getting into. McCourt then abruptly interrupts himself (which becomes common throughout the book) as though he has forgotten to mention some pertinent fact, and then proceeds to introduce his parents. Although he is now writing from his parents’ point of view, the reader is quite aware that this is still McCourt’s interpretation of their story.
...her name, and a pink ribbon from her cap flutters down from the sky. In disbelief that even his own wife who he loves had fell to yet the same temptation everyone else in the community had, the narrator has an epiphany. Instead of reaffirming him and his wife’s Paritan beliefs and impurities, the next morning the narrator exits the woods and returns to his Christian village, and every person he passes seems evil to him. The change of heart he had in the forest left him unassured of himself as well as no longer being able to trust anyone, even his own wife. This overall leaves the protagonist in and harassed and unhappy state.
Considering all the methodical aspects of the story of a nine-year-old girl who must choose between protecting a white heron and losing a new friend, the point of view of the story was most ambiguous to critics. “A White Heron” is told in an omniscient third-person point of view. The narrator went from past tense to present tense three times in the story. One of the times that the narrator used present tense was when Sylvia first heard the hunter approaching in the woods, “this little woods-girl is horror-stricken" (Jewett 5). The narrator seems to have more of an interest in Sylvia’s thoughts and feelings than the other characters’ because nothing more is shown of the other characters’ thoughts and feelings besides what they demonstrate through their words and actions. At tim...
The author of “The Thing in The Forest,” Antonia Susan Byatt, is an intellectual with great knowledge of nineteenth century history and many other literary arts; she is an overall genre title of fairy tale lore, and expresses this type of literature in the presented story (BC 1970). Byatt creates a short story set in Britain, during a warring time, and shares the details of two young girls as they go through a traumatic experience that will be carried with them throughout their adult lives. A.S. Byatt takes a third person omniscient narration of the lives of the two protagonists of the short story “The Thing in The Forest” in order to give vivid detail, connection, and suspense to her plot.
Bringing up a teenager is one of the hardest things that many parents encounter. This is basically from the fact that at this age, children develop some kind of rebellion from the parental authority and directives (Macvarish, 2010). Children are exposed to peculiar changes which are both psychological and physical. New pressures from the growing hormones start to work on teenagers and to a wise parent; this should be a time of detailed dialogue with the teenager. Failure to do so may yield to repercussions that are both burdening to both the teenager and the parents. One of such consequences is teenage parenting.
Parental Influence on Children The way in which a child is raised has a definite influence on the lifestyle the person will once live. Religion, mores, values and common etiquettes are all passed on from generation to generation. A result of good values and more for a child may result in a successful lifestyle, possibly filled with expensive material objects, often living a lavish life. However, Terri D. Heath is not concerned with these results.