Robert Frost/Poems

The Home Burial poem by Robert Frost was very touching and sad to me. It is always sad  lose a child and the fact that it sounds as if they buried the child in their back yard for the mother to see the grave stone is shocking. There is no way that if I lost one of my children that I could live in a house where my child was buried in the yard next to me. It was surprising also to me that the husband didn’t know at first what was wrong with her. As a husband I feel he should have definitely known that she would be in a state of depression.

The Road Not Taken is somewhat like life is now. It always seems that you always have two choices, a good choice and a bad choice and a lot of times it seems difficult to determine which one is good and or bad. But as he stated in his poem two roads, maybe one day he will take the other road. But sometimes just as in life there is not always a second chance to the roads that we take. There is not always a second chance. We make bad decisions sometimes and there is nothing that we can do about it. Some regret from these bad choices. Some are smart and learn from their mistakes and do not make the same mistakes again.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I sometimes found the conclusion to the story to be hard to determine. In The Awakening Edna’s life would seem happy, like a typical life of a wife and a mother back then. But as you continue to read you realize how unhappy Edna is in her life. She feels that she is missing something. Although her husband provides all of the material things that he wants and her family needs, she is still very unhappy and feels a void in her life. She goes on a summer vacation and meets a man named Robert. Robert really likes Edna but seems to be a good man. Robert leaves and leaves Edna a note. She goes back home with her family and things do not feel the same. She distances herself from her husband and kids. She eventually leaves the big house and her family to go live in a small house alone. When she finds out that Robert has come back she is sure that the void that she feels will be gone because he is her true love. But as noted earlier he is a good man. He cannot live with knowing that he broke up her family. He refuses to be the cause of her families distance. So he leaves again. She then realizes that she will always be alone and no matter what she will continue to feel that void that her husband cannot fill.

Kate Chopin Bio/Intro

Born in St. Louis, Kate Chopin’s parents Eliza and Thomas O’Flaherty were Irish immigrants who became rich merchant and arranged for their daughter to be educated in a Roman Catholic Convent school. This was definitely a plus for Kate so that she could have a better life when she grew up. She later became one of the acknowledged belles of society. When she was nineteen she married Oscar Chopin. Her husband died later of swamp fever and she moved all of children to St. Louis. She would definitely have to be a strong woman to take care of six children on her own. She began to write again. When her first writing failed she began to sell her stories to magazines such as Vogue. She would often write about subjects that challenged normative female scripts of the nineteenth century. Her novel The Awakening was judged as being too strong drink for moral babes. They also judged by saying The Awakening should be labeled poison. She was in amazement that she was being criticized his harshly. So Kate withdrew and ceased to write almost entirely. Five years later she died. It was not until after she died that her work was recognized as going beyond the conventions of popular fictions for women to portray the anguish of women and men who are bereft of hopeful illusions and impelled by forbidden desires.

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Gilman

The Yellow Wall-paper is definitely about Charlotte Gilman’s real life. The character John must be her husband, which is a doctor.  Sadly, her brother is also a doctor and agrees with John that there is nothing wrong with her as far as being sick that the only thing that is wrong is her mental state of mind. She does not agree obviously. But since they are both of high standing she feels that no one else would believe her if she tried to argue with their assumption so she just keeps quite about it. Her husband has her on medicines every hour. She feels very sleepy after taking them. She knows that she is not allowed to work until she gets better. She still wrote some in spite of them but says that it does exhaust her. The house that they live in sounds like a mansion, I guess due to her husband’s doctor pay. It is gated and is surrounded by little houses that the servants live in. There is a huge garden too. She says that the room that she lives in is not decorated too well though. The wallpaper is missing and looks like a little boys room. For some reason she talks about that wallpaper bothering her a whole lot. Apparently it is only a three month rental that they are living in so her husband does not feel it would be worth renovating it since they will only be there a short period of time for her to get better. It sounded towards the end that she had a little more than a nervous issue. She thought that she came out of the wallpaper! That is a little creepy to me. Hopefully if this ended up being the case for the true person it was about that she got the help that she needed.

Charlotte Gilman Bio/Intro

In the biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I felt a similarity between her life and mine. I too grew up without a father and therefore watched my mother struggle to raise me. I admire her strength to continue to strive for the things that she wanted in life. I look up to her for being strong enough not to follow suite and be a house wife. Had it not have been for the women that wanted to make things for themselves and make a name for women in the workforce  in corporate America, all women would probably still be living in the old days and just bearing the kids and cleaning the house. Men would probably still run everything and women would not be considered equal or somewhat equal anyway. I think that it was a little crazy that when she became mentally depressed from her unhappy marriage that the neurologist recommended that that she be in the “rest-cure” for her nervous disorders. His “rest-cure” required that she isolate herself from the modes of self-expression and intellectual growth that had sustained her sense of independence?!? It is completely absurd that doctors would actually tell someone not to express themselves. Or to stay away from the things that she loves to do. This is a prime example of how people viewed women back then and how they felt women should carry themselves and their limitations. I am so glad that things are no longer like that and women are free to do whatever they would like. Although most women still do the house work and take care of the kids, a lot of women juggle a job in there too, like me.

Bierce/Occurrence at Owl Creek

Ambrose Bierce is a veteran hero as well as a famous writer. He has fought in the Shiloh, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary ridge, which have been noted to be some of the bloodiest battles ever. He grew up with an unhappy childhood which are reflected in his work. I think that also the deaths while in the service also play a role in his work. He is known for his stories filled with deaths and separated children and parents. With this being said, his story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge was of coarse of non-other than death. The story starts out telling about a man staring down into the water with his hands tied behind him and a noose tied around his neck. He was Im sure thinking about his soon arriving death. He continues to tell how the man, Payton Farquhar, could only think of his family and how he would love to see them. How if he could somehow escape how great that would be. He also describes he fall and how the rope breaks and he falls some twenty feet. This allows him to fall in the water and swim to safety. The soldiers were still shooting ammunition at him but luckily they did not hit him. He continued to swim until he reached land and was almost home with his family until he gets shot again! Until the end you do not realize that the who time he is still tied up and only dreaming of his escape.

James/Daisy Miller

Henry James grew up wealthy. His father provided his children with tutors and took them back and forth across the ocean to give them a European education and expose them to the international ways. James entered Harvard Law School in 1862. He must have learned a lot from the tutors and was exceptionally smart to get into that college. But he soon withdrew to follow his dreams on a literary career. At the early age of twenty one James published his first book. James ended up residing the rest of his life in Europe.

The writings of Daisy Miller: A Study was very interesting to me. I think his story had a meaning of hard lessons learned type of deal. Daisy Miller was a very rich American girl who was visiting Rome with her mother and brother. They may have money but they lack morals. Daisy meets a man while in Rome by the name of Winterbourne. He does not realize it at first but he falls deeply in love with Daisy. Mrs. Costello, his aunt, gives him a warning to stay away from her, but like most he does not listen. He returns back to Romle to be with Daisy. Eventually Daisy betrays him. He learns his lesson the hard way when Daisy finds herself another man named Mr. Giovanelli. I bet he wishes that he would have listened to his aunt and none of that would have been an issue. I think this story was a lesson learned for both Daisy and Winterbourne.We cannot betray the people that we love. We must be loyal and like the good old book says, treat people the way that you would want to be treating. Some out there have to learn this the hard way because they are stubborn and dont listen the first time.

William Howell/Editha

William Howell was not a very well educated man, but had a lot of credit and opportunity around him for writing and editing. His father being a printer, he seemed to get experience early on in life. He started helping his dad at the early age of seven.

Editha is about a woman named Editha and her boyfriend George. It had just been released of the start of the Spanish American War. Back then in 1898, women wanted their men to go to the army and be proud of him for being a hero. She automatically assumed after hearing about the war that George was going to join. George had always grown up being told that the war was not a good thing. So George was definitely hesitant to join. Once Editha was aware that George may be scared to join, she took this personally. She felt that George did not love her and want to be with her if he would not join. She wrote him a letter telling him how she felt. She was very happy the next day to find out that he had joined just to prove his love for her. She was there when he left with him asking of her only one thing. He asked that if he should die that she check on his mother. She agreed and proudly seen him off thinking he would definitely be returning. She gave him a letter to open later which he did not wait and opened immediately. He very shortly after than died. When Editha went to see after his mother like she had promised George, his mother was very angry with her. She yelled and screamed blaming her for her sons death. He would have never joined the war if it had not had been for her. I completely agree with the mother. I have three sons and would have most definitely been very angry. Women are not like that about adamantly wanting their men to join. I would never push my husband into going to war. First of all there is no use for war considering it solves absolutely nothing. And two I would not want to risk losing him.

Joel Chandler Harris Readings

            It seems that around the time that he was writing that many readers were fascinated by local color stories like it was mentioned in the text. It surprises me Harris wrote a lot of his books based on his experiences from blacks he had known while working as a youth on a Georgia plantation.

            How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp For Mr. Fox was very difficult to read due to all of the misspelled words and the dialect. I do not like how Harris portrayed the black community with the poor dialect. It was almost like he made them sound uneducated. There are places that whites and all races still sound like this today but if a journalist were to write a story I doubt that they would use their dialect, they would just write the word they meant to say in the correct way. Anyway,  I did get from the story that Mr. Fox was always trying to hurt Mr. Rabbit. This kind of portrays how the bad guys never wins the battle.

            I enjoyed reading Free Joe and The Rest of the World. This reading was much easier to read than the one about the rabbit and the fox. It had a little slang but not much. It portrayed the life of slavery versus freed slaves. Even though some of the slaves were so called “free” they truly still did not live a free life. The whites still judged the freed slaves like free Joe and so did the blacks that were still slaves. Even though Joe was free he still wanted to see his wife. It is so sad that the slaves were always separated from their families. The story shows that Joe and Lucinda had an unbreakable bond that nothing could shake. They would not let them see each other but Joe still vowed that he would faithfully wait for her no matter what.