Tony Kites, the Arch Deceiver

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Emma Dovaston

English Coursework: Wide Reading

Tony Kites, the Arch Deceiver is written by a male (Thomas Hardy) and deals with a male and female relationship. The females in this story are portrayed as quite stupid and easily led on. When considering the time of when the prose was written (1870’s) then the women would of also been quite presumptuous and forward. They would have been described as brazen, because in the 1800’s women would only be alone with a man if they were married. I believe that if this was wrote by a female author then the women would not of been depicted as they were but as intellectual and level-headed.

Your shoes by Michele Roberts deals mainly with a mother and daughter relationship. It also covers a sub-relationship with the narrator’s mother, father and husband. The story has been written in the last decade so it is fairly modern. This must be considered when reading the story as in the time it was wrote men and women were both equal.

In the beginning of Your Shoes we are under the impression that the mother is very worried about her daughter’s disappearance. She imagines where her daughter could be, what she may be eating. ‘I hope your eating something’ form this we get the notion that she is anxious for her daughter’s well being.

We then get the idea that the daughter may have an eating disorder, but the mother seems oblivious to it. ‘Late at night I’d catch you raiding the kitchen cupboards’, this could be a result of the poor relationship they have.

After this the narrator becomes negative and pessimistic. ‘Who’d have you’. Form this we can see that it sounds as if she doesn’t even care about where her own daughter is, it is as if she is speaking about a total stranger. She then mentions how her daughter is getting money; she suggests quite willingly that her daughter has turned to prostitution. ‘Do you go with men, is that it?’ she says this about her own daughter which says to the reader that she doesn’t have much respect for her daughter. She then goes on to say how she doesn’t like the thought of her daughter hanging around with ‘drug addicts’, how its ‘not very nice’. The mother now becomes very selfish, only thinking about how her daughter running away is affecting her. ‘I’m sure you’d of never of left if you realised I’d be this upset.’ We can see that the mother is very self-involved is thinking what will other people think a lot of the time. ‘It’s not their fifteen year old daughter…’

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When reading the story we can see that the shoes have been used to put across the mothers feeling towards her daughter.’ It is as if she is communicating to her daughter through the shoes, as long as she can see and feel the shoes, then she feels a connection to her daughter. The images of the shoes are mixed up with the descriptions of the girl. She often starts off by mentioning the shoes and then goes into a thought about her daughter  ‘I locked the wardrobe on those rebellious shoes. They could be like me and grieve ...

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