Compare Baptista in A Mere Interlude and Rose in The Waterfall with respect to how they cope with life's obstacles and their relationship with men.

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ELIT Essay

Compare Baptista in A Mere Interlude and Rose in The Waterfall with respect to how they cope with life’s obstacles and their relationship with men.

There are many similarities between Baptista and Rose in how they cope with life’s obstacles and their relationship with men.  Both personas didn’t dare to face the obstacle and chose to escape from it.  There are also differences between them.  Baptista was stronger than Rose in facing the obstacles because she finally chose to face her obstacles in the end while Rose still escaped from them.  They are also similar in the way they cope with men.   They obeyed them and did what they say.  Their true emotions were usually suppressed.  However the difference is Rose expressed her thoughts in front of Philips.

Both Baptista and Rose faced obstacles in their lives.  They both chose to cope with the obstacles in a similar way.  They both didn’t dare to face the obstacle.  Baptista Trewthen was a schoolmistress but she disliked teaching.  She described the students she taught were “unpleasant, troublesome little things”.  She became a schoolmistress out of obedience since she knew her parents had spent large sums of money on her education.  She chose to escape from this obstacle by marrying David Heddegan.  He was a friend of her parents and is rich and old.  Although Baptista didn’t love him, she chose to marry him in order to escape from teaching.  Baptista met her old love Charles Stow on her way back home and Charles proposed marriage to her.  In order to escape from the obstacle in marrying a man she didn’t like, she decided to marry Charles the next day.  After they got married, Charles went for a swim and drowned because he swam out too far.  Baptista pretended nothing had happened and that she had not married Charles and returned home and married Heddegan.  She was escaping from the death of Charles and tried to cover up her marriage with him.  Later, she was blackmailed by the glazier, the witness to her previous marriage with Charles.  In order to escape from this obstacle, Baptista gave the glazier money and tried to cover it up.  In the four obstacles Baptista faced, she chose to escape from them and to find the easiest way out.

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Rose Vaughan also faced several obstacles and she too chose to escape from it.  When her father died and she could not live in the rectory she was living in anymore, Rose wept tried to occupy her thoughts by cleaning the house.  She stayed in the rectory “arranging her father’s papers, packing his sermons into neat piles, rejecting old letters”.  She was trying to occupy her thoughts by work so she would not think so much about her father and her homeless matter.  Instead of facing the obstacle and finding ways to solve it, she was trying to escape ...

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