More handpicked essays just for you.
Feminism in american literature
Feminism in american literature
Overview of feminism and its place in literature
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Feminism in american literature
Feelings of “the mother”
“The mother”, a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, is about the emotional topic of abortion. The speaker is a woman who terminates her pregnancies and has remorse. Brooks describes the feelings of the woman who has had abortion by presenting her own life experiences. In this poem, she is addressing the general women who have had an abortion several times at the beginning of the poem and herself as a regretful mother of the unborn babies throughout the poem. The mixture of pain, regret and love to the unborn babies of the mother is presented beautifully in this poem. Throughout the poem, the speaker presents the point of view of a mother who terminates her pregnancy, a mother who never forgets her abortions and a mother who always love unborn babies.
In the beginning of the poem in the first stanza, Gwendolyn wants the readers to feel the women who have had an abortion. She starts her poem, by saying “Abortions will not let you forget” (“The mother” 1). She is directly addressing to the world by saying ‘You”, which is very significant to implicate the reader’s mind in...
In the poem titled "The Midwife Addresses the Newly Delivered Woman" the author portrays the strengths and fortune of an Aztec woman she must have while giving birth to a child. The author mentions how the courageous and brave woman went through hard exhausting physical labor. The poem informs the mother that possible unpleasant situations may still occur. The new mother is aware and understanding that she has successfully won mastery. Also it is pointed out when women were giving birth it was like a battle, just as painful as the ones men fought in wars.
Hence, the poem's tone contains elements of remorse as well as impassivity. The traveler's detached description of the mother, "...a doe, a recent killing; / she had stiffened already, almost cold" (6-7), and the wistful detail with which he depicts her unborn offspring, "...her fawn lay there waiting...
Anna Quindlen’s short story Mothers reflects on the very powerful bond between a mother and a daughter. A bond that she lost at the age of nineteen, when her mother died from ovarian cancer. She focuses her attention on mothers and daughters sharing a stage of life together that she will never know, seeing each other through the eyes of womanhood. Quindlen’s story seems very cathartic, a way of working out the immense hole left in her life, what was, what might have been and what is. As she navigates her way through a labyrinth of observations and questions, I am carried back in time to an event in my life and forced to inspect it all over again.
Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The mother" tells us about a mother who had many abortions. The speaker is addressing her children in explain to them why child could not have them. The internal conflict reveals that she regret killing her children or "small pups with a little or with no hair." The speaker tells what she will never do with her children that she killed. She will "never neglect", "beat", "silence", "buy with sweet", " scuffle off ghosts that come", "controlling your luscious sigh/ return for a snack", never hear them "giggled", "planned", and "cried." She also wishes she could see their "marriage", "aches", "stilted", play "games", and "deaths." She regrets even not giving them a "name" and "breaths." The mother knows that her decision will not let her forget by using the phrase "Abortions will not let you forget." The external conflict lets us know that she did not acted alone in her decision making. She mentions "believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate" and "whine that the crime was other than mine." The speaker is saying that her decision to have an abortion was not final yet but someone forced her into having it anyway. The external conflict is that she cannot forget the pain on the day of having the abortions. She mentions the "contracted" and "eased" that she felt having abortions.
Through an intimate maternal bond, Michaels mother experiences the consequences of Michaels decisions, weakening her to a debilitating state of grief. “Once he belonged to me”; “He was ours,” the repetition of these inclusive statements indicates her fulfilment from protecting her son and inability to find value in life without him. Through the cyclical narrative structure, it is evident that the loss and grief felt by the mother is continual and indeterminable. Dawson reveals death can bring out weakness and anger in self and with others. The use of words with negative connotations towards the end of the story, “Lonely,” “cold,” “dead,” enforce the mother’s grief and regressing nature. Thus, people who find contentment through others, cannot find fulfilment without the presence of that individual.
This poem is about abortion and the narrator used the mother’s point of view to express her feeling of how she felt after she aborted her unborn child. The mother felt terrible and remorse about what she did. In this poem I think that the Brooks might had experienced of abortion herself so she wrote this poem to let the reader know how terrible it is to have a abortion. So this will reduce to process of having a abortion.
Sanger attended Calverack College in New York and studied to be a nurse. Working in hospitals gave her an intimate view of the women whose lives were similar to that of her mother’s. She saw many women who had suffered botched abortions an...
This article written by Eleanor Cooney, talk about abortion. In it she shared her experience about an unwanted pregnancy and the difficulties she went through to have a safe abortion. She talks about two women and how they
Gwendolyn Brooks grew up in a racist time period; encouraging her writings to be about the life of a black during this time period. She grew up during one of the hardest time periods known as the Great Depression. Brooks was known for her writing poetry about racism and life of being a black American; she was often criticized for her works but also honored for showing encouragement and hope in her writings.
Lee, Patrick. Abortion & Unborn Human Life. New York: Catholic University of America Publishers, 2010. Print.
The poem becomes personal on line 10 when she uses the first person and says “I lost my mother’s watch”. She is letting the reader know what she has lost in reality. Then she gets sidetracked to mention other things she has lost; she then mentions other things she has lost of much more importance such as houses, continents, realms, and cities, but then again mentions it was not so hard to lose those things. But in the end, mention the loss that really matters. She remembers the qualities of the lover she lost.
The nonfiction book I read was titled Beautiful Child and was written by Torey Hayden. Beautiful Child follows the life of a special education teacher who is new to a school is met with a challenging class consisting of five children, all with very different needs. The class consists of a child who has tourette’s syndrome (Jesse), a child who we later find out has dyslexia (Billy), two twins who have fetal alcohol syndrome (Shane and Zane), and a young girl who is selectively mute (Venus.) Although through the story we see each child grow and progress, Venus is the main character and we see her open up to Torey through books and most important She-Ra comics. As Venus’ story unfolds, so do the horrendous details of her family that include a past of drug abuse and prostitution. The quietness of Venus that left many confused, begins to make
Analysis of The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks. For this assignment, I chose the poem "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks. This poem is generally about abortion and the feelings a mother has. It's about the remembrance of the children aborted and the little things children do that the mother will miss.
In this article, the author has focused on the emotions and normative responses of our modern society on an infant’s death and compared it with the not so natural behaviour of Alto society in general and Alto mothers in specific. She, through detailed interviews and personal experiences, tried to understand and find reasons why Alto women would be so indifferent and not grieve upon such a personal loss. Nancy claims that these women are in denial and subconsciously block their real normal emotions due to the economic and social circumstances that prevail in their town.
Katherine Philips is desperately trying to renew her faith in life, but she is struggling to do so because of the death of her son. She is attempting to justify the loss of her child as a form of consolation, while keeping somewhat emotionally detached to the later death of her stepson in “In Memory of F.P.” The differing phrases, words, and language contrast the two elegies and emphasize the loss and pain in “Epitaph” while diminishing the pain in “Memory of FP.”