Week 8

Willa Cather

A Wagner Matinee

Willa Cather lived from 1873-1947.   She grew up in Nebraska and often dressed and acted like a boy.  She returned to the east and worked in a Pennsylvania newspaper and also taught high school English.  She wrote or ordinary people who often struggled with  finding the meaning of their lives. 

            An example of this was in her short story A Wagner Matinee.  In the story  we have Clark,  boy who is being visited by his Aunt Georgiana, who is in town to attend a settling of the estate from a relative. In her past she had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory.  She had fallen in love with Howard Carpendar and moved west and had to give up much of her music loves. Clark has many great memories of his Aunt raising him and all they shared together.  He thinks it would be a great idea to take her to the symphony. She is a bit out of place and underdressed compared to the others but is willing to go.   At the symphony Richard Wagner is playing and plays, “ The Flying Dutchman”.  This song brings back a lot of emotion out of Georgiana who begins crying during the performance.  In the end everyone leaves and she just doesn’t want to go.  I think  this brought back a lot of regret in her life.  She could have lived the life she wanted had she not left.

Paul’s Case

This story was very sad to me. Paul is a young boy being raised by his father. His mother passed away shortly after his birth.  Paul is very interested in music and not so much school. He gets in trouble at school and everyone seems to look down on him.  When he is at the theatre he is a different person.  He is happy and carefree.  He gets in trouble again and everything he loves is taken away from him. He can no longer go to the theater, see his friends and must get a job.  In doing so he happens to be in charge of a large sum of money and steals it.  He takes off to New York’s Carnegie Hall and has a weekend like no other.  He buys fancy clothes, stays at a fancy hotel, and hangs out with people just like him. He reads in the newspaper that he has been found out and his father is in New York looking for him. He cannot imagine going back to Cordelia  street ever again!  He travels back to Pennsylvania and desides to end his life by jumping in front of a train. So very sad no one ever listened to him. He could have made so much of his life had he just tried harder and not given up.

Susan Glaspell

Triffles

Susan Glaspell grew up in a time that woman were seen and not heard.  They pretty much did what they were told by their husbands and tended to the family and house.  She struggled to show the  struggle woman had for identity, equality and power to be seen and heard. I just can’t imagine growing up and living in that time of the century.

            In her play :” Triffles” she writes of some of the challenges she deals with every day in her own life.   In this play we have  Mrs. Wright who had murdered her husband by strangling him with a rope in their bed.   The county Attorney, Sheriff, Mr. Hale, Mrs. Hale, and Mrs. Peters are all in the home while Mrs. Wright is at the jail. They are investigating the murder in order to find some clues.  Of course only the men are looking and the woman are downstairs trying to assemble some items to take to Mrs. Wright.  The men talk about Mrs. Wright like she is a bad wife. The house is not kept clean enough for them, there are dishes about the kitchen, not what they would like to see.  They cannot seem to find any clues they are looking for.  The woman are finding clues though.  They find that the bird has been strangled and saved in a box maybe for a proper burial.  They can immediately tell the bird has been strangled. They both know it’s a clue because Mr. Wright was also strangled and who else would want to strangle him but maybe his wife because he strangled her only joy and happiness.  They also find the birds cage door is broke as if someone flipped it too hard to get at that bird.  I wonder why they keep quiet. Is it because they are woman and feel that they will not be thought of as serious in their findings?  They seem to stick to do what is expected of them. Maybe they feel he deserved to die after killing an innocent bird and keeping Mrs. Wright home to do nothing all these years. 

Zora Neale Hurston

How it Feels to be Colored Me

Zora Neale Hurston lived from 1891?-1960.  She lived in a time that slavery was no longer legal but there discrimination was still very well known.  I really enjoyed both of her stories that we had to read. They were both really inspiring to me. 

            How It Feels to be  Colored me is about a little girl who had a happy childhood. At the age of 13 her mother died and she was left to be cared for by her father. Her father could not care for her so he sends her to live with various family members.  This is when she realized that she was not like everyone else.  It sounded like her mother gave her great self esteem and growing up in a all black city she was very much secluded from the real prejudices of the world. Zora Neale Hurston had a very similar life and managed to overcome so much. She was able to get into great schools to study and was always recognized in her literary writings.  She went on to write several great novels, short stories.

            The Gilded SixBits was probably my favorite reading of the week.  It was good to see a couple so in love and sad to see it almost ruined by greed and money, especially to find out Mister Otis D. Slemmons was a cheat and liar. Pretending his gold was all real when it wasn’t.  Missie May seemed like such a loving and caring wife. I never thought she would betray her husband in that way.  Made me really  sad how money and greed can come between a couple so in love. I was shocked that Joe did not up and leave right away but stayed until they found their love back to each other.  Im glad he had the faith that he had and they were able to find each other again.