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My Mother and Her Sister

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My Mother and Her Sister
My Mother and her Sister

Happiness is a key factor in life. Weather happiness is found in love, in career, in family - everybody deserves to experience true happiness sometime in life. Life is not complete without this key factor. This is true in the case of the mother in the short story “My Mother and her Sister” who does not seem to find true happiness in life before her days are over.

This assignment will begin with an analysis and interpretation of the short story “My Mother and her Sister” by Jane Rogers. To put the story into perspective the assignment includes a discussion of the text, “Their Social Duties and Domestic habits” by Sarah Stickney Ellis and the picture, “The kiss” by Gustav Klimt. The assignment ends with a short essay about the poem “Affirmation” by Donald Hall to conclude the paper.

A: The short story by Jane Rogers from 2006 is about a mother, Dorothy and her sister, Lucy. When Dorothy dies her sister temporarily moves in with her niece, the narrator. They don’t communicate that well but when they start talking about Dorothy they open up and the narrator expands her knowledge about her mother and her aunt.

The main characters in the story are Lucy and the narrator. Lucy is the sister of Dorothy who died. She is 75 years old and has become a widow after 49 years of marriage. She has 5 children and used to be the perfect old fashioned stay at home mother making homemade jam, knitting cardigans and making huge home cooked meals. As she has gotten older she has changed and become somewhat the opposite of what she used to be like. Her everyday life now consists of a schedule, knitting, no interest in talking and preferring meals out of the microwave. “But she’s self-contained and silent, she’s composed.”[1] Lucy is the complete opposite of her sister. Her sister was not married and constantly had different boyfriends. Where Lucy was the sensible one, Dorothy was the childlike adult. The other main character - the narrator, who is a

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