From the mid to late nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth century, American short story writer Sarah Orne Jewett earned her part in the local color literary movement. In doing so, Jewett writes with a unique style: creating larger-than-life characters, naive narrators, tiny details, and oddities of all sorts. The culmination of these features are used by Jewett to expose busy and primarily middle-class readers to the lives of two young women in the short story “Deephaven Cronies”. Going deeper than the text, Jewett delineates the structure of social class, gender norms, and locality. Right off the story’s title, “Deephaven Cronies” embodies regionalism. Deephaven, a small but aristocratic city, serves as the vacation destination …show more content…
From the “clumps of lilacs” to the “barefooted boys, who sit on the edges to fish” (316), Jewett paints a picture of Deephaven, its residents, its homes, and everything in between. The amount of detail Jewett adds in every sketch magnifies and zooms into Deephaven territory, drawing readers in closer for a better view from the narrator’s perspective. Depictions of local flora, weather, and clothing, develop a sense Deephaven community and its cultural guidelines …show more content…
For example, Danny, one of the most notable sketches within the short story, directly advises the girls not to “believe all the old stories ye hear, mind ye” with a strong dialect (328). Along with learning Deephaven norms, the two girls mature in confidence and curiosity, and in one case use their “utmost skill and tact to make [Danny] tell us more about himself” (328). Staying in a port city of New England, Jewett’s characters use vocabulary and comparisons that are fairly regional; one of Deephaven’s fisherman describes a fish “as lumbering as an old-fashioned Dutch brig aside a yacht” (325). Very few readers of The Atlantic Monthly, which featured Jewett’s work, would understand this simile, but it still draws interest from the readers for further local substance. By having certain characters share their experiences about their time in Deephaven, Jewett writes “Deephaven Cronies” less of a folklore, and more of a travel journal from the narrator’s
The story takes place in Annadel, a rural town seated in Justice County of southwestern West Virginia, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author does a fantastic job bringing the reader to the setting through the story being depicted by four different characters’ self narrated stories, which effectively puts the reader in the character’s shoes. In addition, a unique trait is added, with the dialogue being written in a presumably region and period specific style southern dialect. This feature not only makes the reader feel as though they are there at that time and place, but also provides for a more interesting read. While the unique style added to the dia...
By presenting the competing sets of industrial and rural values, Jewett's "A White Heron" gives us a rich and textured story that privileges nature over industry. I think the significance of this story is that it gives us an urgent and emphatic view about nature and the dangers that industrial values and society can place upon it and the people who live in it. Still, we are led to feel much like Sylvia. I think we are encouraged to protect nature, cherish our new values and freedoms, and resist the temptations of other influences that can tempt us to destroy and question the importance of the sublime gifts that living in a rural world can bestow upon us.
William Faulkner and Charlotte Gilman are two well known writers for intriguing novels of the 1800’s. Their two eccentric pieces, "A Rose for Emily" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" are equally alluring. These authors and their works have been well recognized, but also critized. The criticism focuses on the society that is portrayed in these novels. The modern readers of today’s society are resentful to this dramatic society. These two novels are full of tradition, rebellion and the oppression over women’s rights. Both of these novels share the misery of the culture, but there is some distinction between the two. "A Rose for Emily" is a social commentary while "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an informative novel about the writer herself. The authors outlook focus on the gloomy structure in society during that time frame and therefore, create down hearted, reckless characters that offer stimulation for women of all generations.
This novel also looks at social norms overseeing gender in the southern states around the 1960's. White women in the book are valued by the amount of children they can reproduce for the black women to raise. Even though getting a job is difficult for these black woman, the white women have a hard time seeking out a job as well. But these black women sacrifice their lives to be major workhorses surrendering their own families to work for white employers. Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter confront the roles put upon them by society and receive fulfillmen...
Williams, A. N. (2006). OUR KIND OF PEOPLE: SOCIAL STATUS AND CLASS AWARENESS IN POST-RECONSTRUCTION AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent?id=uuid:c9d7fd9d-c5df-4dea-aa22-35820de5878e&ds=DATA_FILE
After reading from the novels The Last Hurrah and The Living is Easy, both surrounding the city of Boston in similar eras with similar views on public and political life, what comes to mind most of all is the portrayal of the middle class. This middle class is not the idea conjured from traditional historical figures, but rather a constantly fluctuating zone of monetary and social value. Being vague by definition, the middle class arises as people move from the inner city to the suburbs and form newly constructed neighborhoods, which were previously held by the wealthy. In The Living is Easy, Cleo desperately tries to rid herself of the stigmatism surrounding her race and the stereotypes, which follow it. By moving to Brookline, she attempts to move up in the world. The Irish immigrants in West’s novel are even more visible in The Last Hurrah. O’Connor’s novel fast-forwards to the beginning of the Irish expansion to the suburbs and into a state of normalcy and association with the middle class. Race is a prevalent issue in both novels and surrounds the commencement of moving to a new social and political stature within city society. While Cleo looks inward and remains aware of the state of her appearance and that of others around her, Skeffington is maintaining his own image and does not wish to evolve towards any new horizon. Racially, the novels’ protagonists share a differentiation from other people in their society. Cleo is of a minority among the middle class and Skeffington has made his life to serve and be idolized by them. With each story coming into contact with racial migration, it’s fair to say that the construction of each of these novels leaves the reader with a view of a changed city, where neighborhoods are changing...
In “Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Jacquelyn Hall explains that future generations would need to grapple with the expenses of commercialization and to expound a dream that grasped financial equity and group unanimity and also women’s freedom. I determined the reasons for ladies ' insubordination neither reclassified sexual orientation parts nor overcame financial reliance. I recollected why their craving for the trappings of advancement could obscure into a self-constraining consumerism. I estimated how a belief system of sentiment could end in sexual peril or a wedded lady 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, in any case, should cloud a generation’s legacy. I understand requirements for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the section of ladies into open space and political battles beforehand cornered by men all these pushed against conventional limitations even as they made new susceptibilities.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.
Ford, Karen. “The Yellow Wallpaper and Women’s Discourse.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.2 (1985): 309-14. JSTOR. Web. 6 April 2011.
George Saunders, a writer with a particular inclination in modern America, carefully depicts the newly-emerged working class of America and its poor living condition in his literary works. By blending fact with fiction, Saunders intentionally chooses to expose the working class’s hardship, which greatly caused by poverty and illiteracy, through a satirical approach to criticize realistic contemporary situations. In his short story “Sea Oak,” the narrator Thomas who works at a strip club and his elder aunt Bernie who works at Drugtown for minimum are the only two contributors to their impoverished family. Thus, this family of six, including two babies, is only capable to afford a ragged house at Sea Oak,
Society continually places restrictive standards on the female gender not only fifty years ago, but in today’s society as well. While many women have overcome many unfair prejudices and oppressions in the last fifty or so years, late nineteenth and early twentieth century women were forced to deal with a less understanding culture. In its various formulations, patriarchy posits men's traits and/or intentions as the cause of women's oppression. This way of thinking diverts attention from theorizing the social relations that place women in a disadvantageous position in every sphere of life and channels it towards men as the cause of women's oppression (Gimenez). Different people had many ways of voicing their opinions concerning gender inequalities amound women, including expressing their voices and opinions through their literature. By writing stories such as Daisy Miller and The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Henry James let readers understand and develop their own ideas on such a serious topic that took a major toll in American History. In this essay, I am going to compare Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” to James’ “Daisy Miller” as portraits of American women in peril and also the men that had a great influence.
Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Literature. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, xi-xxiv. Print.
Greenblatt, Stephen, eds. The Norton Anthology English Literature. 9th ed. Crawfordsville: R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 2012. Print.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.
Gloria Naylor, a celebrated African-American novelist, was born in New York City on January 25, 1950. She has authored six novels, namely The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Cafe (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2005). Her fiction depicts how black men and women struggle to survive and succeed in the oppressive world of racism. Her fictional world generally contains portions of her own life and looks more convincing as she is the part of what she writes “that outline did not say that black was beautiful, it did not say that black was ugly. It said simply: You are. You exist. It reverberated enough to give me courage to pick up the pen. And it’s what finally validated me” (Naylor 171). With a great confidence and authority she writes about the places and the people she is well acquainted with. Naylor’s fictional world is singularly a world of black community, and she selects her characters from its all layers--working to upper class one, and urban North to rural South. The uniqueness of her characters is that they are individuals, capable of controlling, to a certain extent, their own destinies. Her novels bear the literary influence of the