Prologue Vs Divorcee's Tale

Paul Newman once said, “People stay married because they want to, not because the doors are locked” (74). There is no such thing as the perfect relationship, however, being involved in a healthy relationship is essential for a person to feel valued, safe, and happy. Unfortunately, in the situation of Kelly Sundberg’s personal essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” and Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of An Hour,” include extreme examples of unhealthy relationships. The essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” shares painful experiences of Sundberg’s physical and emotional abusive relationship with her husband Caleb, while “The Story of an Hour,” shares a rare reaction of a married woman, Louise Mallard, who explores her emotions cautiously when hearing about the death of her husband. Each woman faces their own prison created by their husbands. The two marriages represent the figurative meaning of doors being locked in a marriage. Both pieces of literature convey the theme of confinement by using the literary devices of foreshadowing, imagery, and conflict.

In Chopin’s short story, she demonstrates how men in the late ninetieth and early twentieth century treated their wives more as possessions than individuals, thus when the protagonist Mrs. Mallard learns her husband Brently Mallard just unexpectedly died, she feels “free, free, free!” (15). Since, Chopin published this short story in 1894; women often got married while they were quite young and typically to men much older. Likewise, divorce was never usually an option for unhappy marriages. Subsequently, Mrs. Mallard appears unhappy in her marriage, after learning about her husband’s death, she pictures how much better her life is going to be, “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that persistence with which men and women believe they have the right to impose a private will upon a

Women are taught from a young age that marriage is the end all be all in happiness, in the short story “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin and the drama “Poof!” by Lynn Nottage, we learn that it is not always the case. Mrs. Mallard from “The Story of an Hour” and Loureen from “Poof!” are different characteristically, story-wise, and time-wise, but share a similar plight. Two women tied down to men whom they no longer love and a life they no longer feel is theirs. Unlike widows in happy marriages Loureen and Mrs., Mallard discover newfound freedom in their respective husband’s deaths. Both stories explore stereotypical housewives who serve their husbands with un-stereotypical reactions to their husband’s deaths.

In “Shiloh,” by Bobbie Ann Mason, the reader is able to glimpse the beginning of the end of a marriage. Mason allows the audience to see the different strings unravel as the character’s separates from each other, emotionally, mentally and physically. In “Shiloh,” a woman’s husband, Leroy, has been in an accident and is no longer able to continue with his work of truck driving. The woman, Norma Jean, is unable to cope with her husband being home all of the time and begins to find ways to get away from him and her overbearing mother, Mabel. Throughout the story we see Leroy’s struggle to stay with his wife and Norma Jean’s struggle to break away from her husband. As Leroy and Norma’s marriage continues to drift apart, Mabel

In the United States, an all-too-frequent occurrence unfortunately is divorce. I feel that this is a sad thing. Billy Collins tackles this delicate issue masterfully in his poem “Divorce,” an eighteen-word, four-line poem that catches the tone of many splits while using simple things like utensils and tables to make examples of a couple’s situation, using metaphors, imagery, nostalgia, and irony.

Divorce is a negative experience for all who are involved, especially children. Maile Meloy’s “Hot or Cold,” a short story originally published in The New Yorker on December 22, 2003, is a reflection about her life as a child of divorce. The premise of the story is that the narrator is looking back on a memory from her childhood where she is in her family’s Volkswagen bus with a babysitter and her younger brother. Outside, her parents were skiing when a bear began to chase them, presumably because her mom was carrying chicken sandwiches in her backpack. At first, they tried to sing “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” in a humorous attempt to scare the bear off. They cross country skied back to the bus as he followed them, and zoomed off. The narrator witnessed the whole ordeal, and comes to think of it as a representation of her parents’ divorce. Meloy’s utilization of literary devices, including juxtaposition, symbolism, and imagery, tells the story of her parent’s divorce through her eyes as a young girl.

The short stories, “The Story of An Hour”, by Kate Chopin and “The Jury of Her Peers”, by Susan Glaspell compare two married women who live under the shadow of their husbands. Both of these stories were written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries during the time when women were treated unequally. Women had limited rights. For example, they could not vote, voice their opinion or work outside the home. Glaspell and Chopin were considered feminist writers who focus their writing on the struggle of women during the time when the Women’s Suffrage Movement was beginning; these short stories reflect women’s struggles under the control of men. Married women were responsible for taking care of the household, children and wifely duties while the husbands were responsible for consistently managing the title of “the breadwinner.” Married women were expected to be discreet and obedient to their husbands, which meant that the wives could not express their opinions because of society’s expectations of women. In the short stories, “The Story of An Hour”, by Kate Chopin and “The Jury of Her Peers”, by Susan Glaspell, Mrs. Mallard and Mrs. Wright share a prominent similarity concerning the loss of their individual identity during marriage and realize that the death of their husbands allow them to regain their self-identity.-

The story begins with the passage; “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.” The conflict of the story begins here. Mrs.

Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” examine the complex relationship between a husband and wife. The two works take two different approaches to convey the same message: Marriage is not a fairytale, it requires sacrifice and unselfish behavior in order to work. Relationships are difficult to begin and harder to maintain. Mr. and Mrs. Mallard and Aylmer and Georgiana are two relationships that shatter the surreal perception of marriage and expose readers to the raw truth, marriage is not a fairytale.

These characters grow as they suffer through marriage problems. When the woman leaves the man, which lets him learn his mistakes and to be grateful for the things they had. He writes, “Things to tell her. That I’m sorry. That I miss her. That all I want-all I ever wanted-is for her to be happy” (Dooley and Holzman 3). The man has learned and developed into a greater human being.

The two short stories share one similar theme, and contrast in others. The theme these two stories can compare is how the women, Mrs. Mallard and Clair feel about their loved ones and the relationship problems they face. The unsteady relationship becomes apparent when Mrs. Mallard expresses that she feels a sense of freedom when she hears of her husband’s death, which is odd for any marriage unless there is a sense of unhappiness within the relationship. Learning Mrs. Mallard feels free after her husband’s death makes the reader believe she was in an unhealthy

“Where Is It Written”, by Adam Schwartz is a story about Sam’s parents’ divorce. Sam first wants his father to sue his mother. Then, he wants to go live with his dad. Finally, he realized that his parents’ divorce was weighing too much on his mother. Coming of age is an important theme in which the main character acquires a certain mental maturation. Sam came of age because he came to know or understand why his mother was behaved the way she was or he noticed that his mother’s behavior changed from when she was still married and after being divorced, again he came of age when he remembered his grandmother’s death.

Personal Narrative: Divorce Mum had briefly informed me that we were going to a place that would

In a country where Divorce is more normalized than ever before, one can be guilty of neglecting to consider the pain it can cause, not just the couple, but also their children. The short story “Hot or Cold” by Maile Meloy is a remembrance from the author's life which communicates the divorce of her parents represented in a nostalgic memory from her past. In the piece, the author’s young self plays in a van while her parents deal with an unexpected encounter with a bear. After a brief chase, the parents escape and the family drives away. The author masterfully develops the story by hinting at the nature of the parents relationship by adding clever metaphors, until it is apparent that the parents eventually divorce and that the story is only a dream. In the short story, the author utilizes juxtaposition, a motif, and metaphors, to suggest that memories create narratives, true or otherwise, that help one comprehend events that are otherwise incomprehensible.

The use of comparative imagery throughout “The Victims” suggests that divorce induces suffering on the family sphere. During the first half of the poem a resilient (strong?) metaphor is present. The comparison between the family’s reaction to the father’s misfortunes and the way society responded to the disgraceful retreat from the U.S.