Compare and Contrast "I go back to May, 1937" and "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
Tabetha Harrison
December 6, 2014
English 101
A comparison of abusive relationships and what came of them
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers and I go back to May, 1937 both deal with abusive relationships and what lives on because of them, and they differ in the perspective of the abuse. Aunt Jennifer’s wedding band weighed heavily upon her terrified hands in contrast with the free tigers pouncing about the trees. The parents in Olds’s poem were “pitiful, beautiful, untouched bodies” but later they are said to do “horrible things to children” and are “going to want to die”. The tigers and Sharon Olds are dependent on the abusive relationship to continue because they are their fruits. The poems are different in the way that the tigers cannot give their perspective of the events happening to Aunt Jennifer, but Olds can give perspective of her parents. Aunt Jennifer takes excellent care of her tigers while the parents do horrible things to the children that they’ve made. The voice in Aunt Jennifer’s Tiger’s is more subtle about the abuse and takes a couple of read-throughs to understand Aunt Jennifer while Sharon olds is about as subtle as the Kool-Aid man bursting through the wall and bellowing “OH YEAH!!” At first, I did not understand fully the scope of What Aunt Jennifer had to deal with. The tigers’ behavior in the first stanzas seems perfectly normal for animals such as themselves. They are powerful creatures that do not need to constantly assert their dominance. I originally thought that Aunt Jennifer was an old woman with weak hands making her embroidery difficult and she had a large, heavy wedding band from a man who thought enough of her to give her a large rock. Of course abusers may shower their victims in extravagant gifts, this is called the “Honeymoon Stage” of abuse. Not until the last four lines of the poem did I get that Aunt Jennifer had been abused because of her “terrified hands, still ringed with the ordeals she was mastered by”. The tigers prance “proud
December 6, 2014
English 101
A comparison of abusive relationships and what came of them
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers and I go back to May, 1937 both deal with abusive relationships and what lives on because of them, and they differ in the perspective of the abuse. Aunt Jennifer’s wedding band weighed heavily upon her terrified hands in contrast with the free tigers pouncing about the trees. The parents in Olds’s poem were “pitiful, beautiful, untouched bodies” but later they are said to do “horrible things to children” and are “going to want to die”. The tigers and Sharon Olds are dependent on the abusive relationship to continue because they are their fruits. The poems are different in the way that the tigers cannot give their perspective of the events happening to Aunt Jennifer, but Olds can give perspective of her parents. Aunt Jennifer takes excellent care of her tigers while the parents do horrible things to the children that they’ve made. The voice in Aunt Jennifer’s Tiger’s is more subtle about the abuse and takes a couple of read-throughs to understand Aunt Jennifer while Sharon olds is about as subtle as the Kool-Aid man bursting through the wall and bellowing “OH YEAH!!” At first, I did not understand fully the scope of What Aunt Jennifer had to deal with. The tigers’ behavior in the first stanzas seems perfectly normal for animals such as themselves. They are powerful creatures that do not need to constantly assert their dominance. I originally thought that Aunt Jennifer was an old woman with weak hands making her embroidery difficult and she had a large, heavy wedding band from a man who thought enough of her to give her a large rock. Of course abusers may shower their victims in extravagant gifts, this is called the “Honeymoon Stage” of abuse. Not until the last four lines of the poem did I get that Aunt Jennifer had been abused because of her “terrified hands, still ringed with the ordeals she was mastered by”. The tigers prance “proud