Joe decides that Mary is so obnoxious and he is tired of her bossing Mike around when Mike is the only one working late at night at Phillies. While Mary is outside yelling at Mike, Joe sneaks outside where there was a phone booth was and called the police on her to see if they can calm her down. Ring! Ring! Ring! The police finally picked up the phone. “What's your Emergency?” asked a male police officer. Joe answered “Well this crazy lady named Mary Field has been yelling at the bartender at Phillies.” “ She is complaining about her food being apparently it is taking so long.” “I want to see if you guys can please help me calm her down I am too scared because if I tried she probably would hurt me.” The police responded “this sounds like a silly situation, but we will help you, be there in a few minutes.” The phone call was over and Joe sat on the little bench outside and waited for the police to arrived. Joe got scared because he heard a door slamming. He looked back at the restaurant and saw Mike with Mary's food. Joe noticed that the police just arrived. The police and Joe were watching what Mary was doing to Mike. She was screaming and yelling at him, but he had the food in his hand. Mary grabbed a fork and got so mad that she threw a fork at Mike and the fork hit Mike's head. Suddenly Mike fell back into the counter ledge in a slow motion movement, drops Mary’s food on the sky blue floor, and fell unconscious.…
On the other hand, Lamb to the Slaughter is a murder case instinctively executed by Mary Maloney, who is the wife to the deceased Patrick Maloney. Although Mary commits the crime after her husband broke the news about the plan to divorce her, she immediately comes to her senses after hitting him “as hard as she could” with a frozen leg of a lamb. She successfully lays down a plan to deceive the police that she was…
Not only did Mr. Maloney say he wanted to leave, but the reason must have been extrememly disturbing to Mary. Although the book did not state why he wanted to leave, a movie made from the book of Lamb to the Slaughter says that he was in love with someone else. Mary was going to cook a hole leg of lamb for dinner that night. When she went to retrieve the lamb leg from the freezer she just realized the reality of what was going on. She was furious. The lamb was frozen solid, like a rock. Mr. Maloney was in the living room facing the opposite way towards the window so he coldn't see Mary. Mrs. Maloney came up with an idea. With no hesitation, she walked up behind her husband and hit him over the head as hard as she could with the frozen solid leg of lamb. Mr. Maloney is…
Mary Maloney is very devious. In the stories, “The Landlady” and “Lamb to the Slaughter”, the antagonists are both devious, but one is more devious than the other. Mary Maloney is more devious because she made the police eat the lamb and she pretended to not know that Patrick was dead.…
Betty Friedan and Barbara R. Bergmann both dissect the occupation and implications of being a housewife but from two different angles and for two different audiences.…
Mr. Maloney had asked Mrs. Maloney to sit so he could discuss his wishes to get a divorce. She never expected this night to take a turn like this, so when he told her this she was in disbelief. She did not want to face reality so she got up out of her chair and grabbed the lamb leg from the freezer to make dinner. Mr. Maloney said he was leaving and to not make dinner. Then, she picked up the lamb from the table and bashed it into his skull. The back of Mr. Maloney’s head was completely shattered. She realized what she had done, but showed not even a glimpse of remorse across her face. She murdered him in cold…
Mr.Boddy was dead with professor Plum holding the gun. He drops the gun. He screamed bloody murder. But the Butlers checked mister Body to see if he was dead. But the bullet it his ear. But he was cold. I looked and ran in the kitchen. Every one followed me. Mr.mustard opened the freezer Mr.Boddy body was in there plum caught Mr.Boddy he must have been alive. But know he is dead.…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a book in 1892 called “The Yellow Wallpaper”, accounting her own mental breakdown from reality in what would now be called post-partum depression in the form of a short horror story with use of symbolism and imagery. The short story depicts what a woman with depression and finally a psychotic break went through. There are femininities within this story, but the masculinities, as well, that led Gilman’s character’s mental breakdown. The 1890s was a time in history when women were not given the freedoms that most women enjoy today. Women of the 1890s obeyed their husbands without question. The man did run the house to a certain extent. He did not clean the home, but he did expect to come home to a clean house. The food was to be prepared on his schedule, and his wife was to be clean and pressed. His children were to have gone to school, and were required to be presentable to the father, should he call on them. This description is certainly not based on the average “middle income” family of today. This family dynamic was based off of Gilman’s description of her own historical time. The family described in the short story is of an upper class family. The husband can provide the financial foundation for their lifestyle, and the wife does not have to cook or clean because the family can afford to hire someone else, a nanny and maid.…
In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Choplin, Mrs. Mallard finds freedom in the false belief that her husband is dead, and she dies when she faces the truth. The story takes place back in the 1890’s where women were not treated equally and their expected duties were only to maintain a home and care for their husband, also know as a “house wife”. Throughout the story Mrs. Mallard goes through a transformation of initially grieving and accepting her husbands death then fantasizing on the happiness she will embark now that she is freed from the clutches of her husbands existence.…
The traditional outlook on life has dissipated in modern years. Men were usually the ones who worked to support the family and maintained a steady income to make the family financially stable. On the contrary, women were expected to raise the children, prepare meals and keep a tidy house. For most, this was the ideal life style that worked effectively. Throughout Gail Godwin's short story, "A Sorrowful Woman", the character is a component of a troubled family. Furthermore in the short story, "The Story of an Hour" written by Kate Chopin, the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard is notified with information that is life altering. A characters motivation drives a story towards the authors intended theme through the actions taken and emotions that are depicted.…
In Friedan’s chapter “The Happy Housewife Heroine,” she critiques the stories run in popular women’s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Redbook during the 1950s. Her frustration becomes very evident when detailing the “fluff’ presented to women. Friedan observes, “The new mystique makes the housewife-mothers, who never had a chance to be anything else, the model for all women” (92). Donna Seaman explains, “[Friedan] cites many blood-pressure-elevating examples of an “unremitting harangue” of “deceptively simple, clever, outrageous ads and commercials” that imply that “the great majority of American women have no ambition other than to be housewives” (1). It is no surprise that Friedan so easily found examples of articles and journals targeted toward the ideals of the feminine mystique. Popular magazines printed very few articles that portrayed women as anything but content housewives. After reviewing numerous articles and advertisements from The Washington Post, critic Mei-Ling Yang observed a stark contrast in the content presented to women in the 1950s. She writes, “Compared to the untitled women's pages of 1945, the "For and About Women" section emphasized homemaking, beauty, food, child care, and fashion. Articles on homemaking proliferated from…
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, portrays a young married woman, Nora, who plays a dramatic role of deception and self-indulgence. The author creates a good understanding of a woman’s role by assuming Nora is an average housewife who does not work; her only job is to maintain the house and raise the children like a stereotypical woman that cannot work or help society. In reality, she is not an average housewife in that she has a hired maid who deals with the house and children. Although Ibsen focuses on these “housewife” attributes, Nora’s character is ambitious, naive, and somewhat cunning. She hides a dark secret from her husband that not only includes borrowing money, but also forgery. Nora’s choices were irrational; she handled the situations very poorly in this play by keeping everything a secret. The way that women were viewed in this time period created a barrier that she could not overcome. The decisions that had the potential to be good were otherwise molded into appalling ones. Women should have just as many rights as men and should not be discriminated by gender; but they should also accept consequences in the same way without a lesser or harsher punishment.…
In American society it is a social norm for women to be delicate and vulnerable, they are seen as too weak to do the same things men do. This was especially true during the time period in which the stories “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “Jury of her peers,” and “Story of an Hour” were written in. The characteristics of gender roles, shown through in each individual story and hint at the stereotypes that were places on women of that time period. These specific female characters don’t let those stereotypes define them, they break free and show their true strengths. Though their societies would suggest them fragile, the main characters -- Louise Mallard, Minnie Foster Wright, and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” -- respectively presented in the…
One writer wrote a book titled The Yellow Wallpaper. This book is through the perspective of a woman writing through a journal that is kept private from her husband. She has a serious case of depression, her husband who is a doctor takes care of her. Her husband thinks of her as a helpless child and has controlling ways. The woman is really dependent on her husband which makes it so without him she cannot do much on her own. He tells her that her treatment requires her to do nothing active. She is essentially locked in a room and cannot leave while her husband leave most of the day and gets to go out and enjoy his life. When she did bring up to her husband that she wanted to leave the house her husband would bring up her the concerns he has and the conversation ends. This was true for women that did not have her condition, they could have the chance to leave but they had to take care of the kids, clean, and cook. So when the day was over and their husbands came home they still could not leave because they had to take care of their husbands their long day at work. Another big book in the nineteenth century, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had a few women in the story such as Sally Phelps who is an example of the typical housewife, she is totally dependent on her husband which takes her freedoms and leaves her in the house all day to clean and cook. The…
In her op.ed “The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood” written in 1977, Terry Martin Hekker reveals the judgement housewives go through because society does not respect their non-paying job. Hekker opens up by sharing personal encounters involving the embarrassment of telling others her occupation as well as theoretically comparing herself to an endangered species. Hekker continues to elaborate on this metaphor by citing a statistic that states “fewer than 16 percent of American families have a full-time housewife-mother” and as this rate continues to decrease, eventually she will be the only housewife remaining (37). In a humorous manner, she also mentions the enormous fame and publicity she will receive in the future because her profession will be so rare. In a whimsical tone, she gives the example of charging expensive fees for interviews and autographs such as celebrities do. She moves forward by using sarcastic examples such as how it is considered “heroic” to take care of someone else’s children than your own to demonstrate how society views housewives as ignorant and unacceptable. In her finishing sentence, she relates herself back to being an endangered species to stress the ongoing struggle and judgement a housewife, such as herself, faces due to how poorly society views housewifery.…