The Country Husband by John Cheever The Country Husband, by John Cheever, is a story about the life of Francis Weed as he dealt with his mid-life crisis. There is a supportive mid-life crisis theme throughout the entirety of the story. John Cheever goes through many stressful events that almost caused him to lose his family life. The story starts off on a plane in which John was riding home from Minneapolis. The plane crashed and John was left with a near death experience. This event kicked off the story of John's crisis with a big bang. From here on everything John goes through is normally excepted in our society, but with the plane crash in the back of his mind, any normal events become abnormal and add up to overwhelm him. Like any person would do in our culture, John returned home expecting sympathy and wide-open ears to hear about his exciting plane crash. This is where things started to go bad. John returns to a house full of crying and arguing children that wanted nothing to do with the great story of the crash. This upsets John but he gets over it and tucks away his disappointment; the overwhelming begins. John had a minor release of stress at the dinner table; he yelled to stop the madness but it only added to his problems when everyone started crying including his wife, Julia. Up to this point, the reader believes John to have just had a bad day, but the tragedy that awaits him is yet to come. John walked outside and reminisced about all of the things that are a common anomaly in the nighttime at Shady Hill. During this short pause in events the author is cooling down the plot. Not only does John get stressed out in the book, but the reader also feels his stress, so the author throws in thi... ... middle of paper ... ... marriage. All of these events are building the story up to a final climax. The events get more repetitive as the story gets closer to climax. In reaction to Clayton's recent engagement, John very selfishly spread rumors about Clayton so that to prevent him from getting a job. This is the climax of the story where John realizes everything that he has done and how out of character he has become. He decides to resolve his problems by visiting a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist gave John a stress relieving activity and everything became back to normal again. The story of The Country Husband is clearly a story of a mid-life crisis. This theme is built up through events like the plane crash, the young girl, and the fight between John and Julia. The story was rather uninteresting but regardless, it would've been quite difficult to stop reading once started.
The times are changing and he's unwilling to give up the past. The world is becoming modernized and people like him, cowboys and ranchers, are slowly disappearing. He runs away from home because he desires to find peace within himself, as well as a place where he can feel he belongs. Here begins the adventure of John Grady and his best friend Lacey Rawlins. It is important to note here the means of travel.
Summary and Response to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Called Home” In “Called Home”, the first chapter of the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver presents her concerns about America's lack of food knowledge, sustainable practices, and food culture. Kingsolver introduces her argument for the benefits of adopting a local food culture by using statistics, witty anecdotal evidence, and logic to appeal to a wide casual reading audience. Her friendly tone and trenchant criticism of America's current food practices combine to deliver a convincing argument that a food culture would improve conditions concerning health and sustainability.
Flannery O'Connor's "Good Country People" is a story told through the examination of the relationships between the four main characters. All of the characters have distinct feelings about the others, from misunderstanding to contempt. Both Joy-Hulga, the protagonist, and Manley Pointer, the antagonist, are multi-faceted characters. While all of the characters have different levels of complexity, Joy-Hulga and Manley Pointer are the deepest and the ones with the most obvious facades.
The traditional values of a “Nuclear Family” that were set up in the 1960’s are a reoccurring theme throughout “The Country Husband” by John Cheever. Francis Weed demonstrates the strain of a domestic lifestyle, and his character communicates the chaos that pressure ensues. With changes in attitude, the struggles of a traditional suburban community, characterization of a middle-aged man who suffers with morality and the desperation for escape from reality, Francis Weeds finds himself in what would be identified as a “mid-life crisis.” In the short story, Francis portrays reckless behavior due to the adolescent yearnings. He wants to pursue an unattainable affair with the engaged babysitter that his wife hires. With his codependent characteristics, Francis is unable to escape his reality. When Julia, his wife, threatens to leave him due to his uncaring demeanor he persuades her to stay because he realizes that he is hopeless without her and he simply
BIOGRAPHY: According to the entry « Eudora Welty » found on Wikipedia, Eudora Alice Welty was an American author and photographer, well-known for working on the South American theme. She began higher education at the University of Wisconsin, then went to New York, where she studied at Columbia University until 1931. Unable to find a job on the East Coast because of unemployment due to the Great Depression, she went back to her her native city Jackson, Mississippi. She started to publish short stories in magazines from 1936 and rapidly acquired notoriety as a short story writer, managing to carefully describe the culture and the racial issues of the South. Each publication of her short stories collections was considered as a literary event. In 1956, her novel The Pounder Heart, adapted by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, achieved great success on Broadway. In 1975, her enchanting novel The Robber Bridegroom became a musical. In 1973, Eudora Welty received the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter. Three years earlier, she published a collection of photographs that she had taken herself in the years 1930 and 1940, One Time, one Place: Mississippi in the Depression: a work intending to depict the harsh living conditions in Mississippi during the Great Depression. In 1984, at the request of Harvard University Press, she put on paper a lecture that she gave the year before to the students: the work became a bestseller. She died of pneumonia in 2001.
Every time the family comes to a confrontation someone retreats to the past and reflects on life as it was back then, not dealing with life as it is for them today. Tom, assuming the macho role of the man of the house, babies and shelters Laura from the outside world. His mother reminds him that he is to feel a responsibility for his sister. He carries this burden throughout the play. His mother knows if it were not for his sisters needs he would have been long gone. Laura must pickup on some of this, she is so sensitive she must sense Toms feeling of being trapped. Tom dreams of going away to learn of the world, Laura is aware of this and she is frightened of what may become of them if he were to leave.
When you meet him you can tell there is something off about him but many people just associated it with his brilliant mind. He later begins showing signs of having a mental illness. Despite his knowledge the illness takes over him and impedes in him doing his work. It gets in the way of his personal and work life. John had to fight the hallucinations and take medication for him to be well. It was hard to see such a brilliant intelligent man go from one extreme to another. It was like as soon as he had his mental out break all was taken from him. With the right medication and with John being compliant in taking his medications he is able to control his schizophrenia and hallucinations and try to return to his old self. With the help of his wife, friends and healthcare team he is able to remember what life was like before his mental illness
By closing her off from the rest of the world, he is taking her away from things that important to her mental state; such as her ability to read and write, her need for human interaction, her need to make her own decisions. All of these are important to all people. This idea of forced rest and relaxation to cure temporary nervous problems was very common at the time. Many doctors prescribed it for their female patients. The narrators husband, brother, and their colleagues all feel that this is the correct way to fix her problem, which is practically nonexistent in their eyes. Throughout the beginning of the story, the narrator tends to buy into the idea that the man is always right and makes excuses for her feelings and his actions and words: "It is so hard to talk to John about my case, because he is so wise and because he loves me so," (23).
I’ve seen it since the first day you two had gotten married. This was not the life you wanted, you were a city girl and always would be. You went along with it for as long as you could trying your best to accept it, until you just got fed up, stopped caring and stopped trying. You became bitter which just made John work harder he figured the more he could do for you the more he would please you. He wanted nothing more than to make you happy, yet every time he left you for the long works hours it just got you that much more angry, when all he was trying to do was make thing better for you. When you had married John you knew that you were becoming a farmer’s wife.
In today’s society, the notion and belief of growing old, getting married, having kids, and a maintaining of a happy family, seems to be a common value among most people. In Kevin Brockmeier’s short story, “The Ceiling,” Brockmeier implies that marriage is not necessary in our society. In fact, Brockmeier criticizes the belief of marriage in his literary work. Brockmeier reveals that marriage usually leads to or ends in disaster, specifically, all marriages are doomed to fail from the start. Throughout the story, the male protagonist, the husband, becomes more and more separated from his wife. As the tension increases between the protagonist and his wife, Brockmeier symbolizes a failing marriage between the husband and wife as he depicts the ceiling in the sky closing upon the town in which they live, and eventually crushing the town entirely as a whole.
The novel, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other (2011) written by Sherry Turkle, presents many controversial views, and demonstrating numerous examples of how technology is replacing complex pieces and relationships in our life. The book is slightly divided into two parts with the first focused on social robots and their relationships with people. The second half is much different, focusing on the online world and it’s presence in society. Overall, Turkle makes many personally agreeable and disagreeable points in the book that bring it together as a whole.
The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing but good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house." Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a "prison-like" room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.
Each John, the narrator's husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Brently Mallard, Mrs. Mallard’s husband in “The Story of an Hour” and Henry Allen, Elisa Allen’s husband in “The Chrysanthemums” unknowingly lead their wives to a state of mental confinement through their actions taken that are meant to help them. John tells his wife to rest and not to think of her condition for the sake of him and the children which drove her mad because
Gilman shows through this theme that when one is forced to stay mentally inactive can only lead to mental self-destruction. The narrator is forced into a room and told to be passive, she is not allowed to have visitors, or write, or do much at all besides sleep. Her husband believes that a resting cure will rid her of her “slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 478). Without the means to express herself or exercise her mind in anyway the narrator begins to delve deeper and deeper into her fantasies. The narrator begins to keep a secret journal, about which she states “And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief” (Gilman 483)! John tells his wife that she must control her imagination, lest it run away with her. In this way John has asserted full and complete dominance over his wife. The narrator, though an equal adult to her husband, is reduced to an infancy. In this state the narrator begins her slow descent into hysteria, for in her effort to understand herself she fully and completely loses herself.
...John comes home and finds the door locked. He begs her to open it and she tells him "The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf!" (Gilman 669) When he comes back and opens the door, he sees her ripping the rest of the paper off the wall, with the rope tied around her and he faints. This is when John realizes that his wife has reached the point of hysteria and is insane. But, the narrator sees it differently. She declares that she is now free by saying: "I've got out at last,..in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (Gilman 669)