July 16th readings

The Revolt of the Mother
Passage:
"Stop!" she cried out again. "Don't you put the hay in that barn; put it in the old one."
"Why, he said to put it in here," returned one of the haymakers, wonderingly. He was a young man, a neighbor's son, whom Adoniram hired by the year to help on the farm.
"Don't you put the hay in the new barn; there's room enough in the old one, ain't there?" said Mrs. Penn.
I had the strongest reaction to this part of the short story. I think I had such a strong reaction to it because this was when Mrs. Penn decided that she was going to do something about the animals having a better place to stay than her own family, and do something about the fact that her daughter doesn’t have somewhere to get married at. I think this was when Mrs. Penn kind of snapped and decided, no matter how scary it was that she was going to do something. I think this was significant to the text as a whole because it was the turning point when we as the reader realized that she was going to stand up to her husband for the first time. There was no turning back from this point on.

As Children Together

Passage:

“I don’t know where you are now, Victoria.
They say you have children, a trailer
In the snow near our town,
And the husband you found as a girl
Returned from the Far East broken
Cursing holy blood at the table
Where nightly a pile of white shavings
Is paid from the edge of his knife.”

I had the strongest reaction to this passage because it brought the whole poem together for me. I had a hard time grasping what Carolyn was saying in this poem but after a couple times of reading it, this passage finally made me realize that it was a childhood friendship. This passage is sad, the author talking about how she has heard about her friend, and not the best things that she has heard. She has heard that the things that she was doing as a child and young adult didn’t bring Victoria to where she wanted to be. The guy that she would run to when she was younger turned out not to be the greatest husband, coming back from war “broken” and “cursing” as the author put it. This is a childhood friend that grew apart and grew different from her.