Essay with an analysis and interpretation of Jane Rogers short story My Mother and her Sister

They talk about the mother. She did not cook fancy dinners or marry. Instead, she had a lot of boyfriends and was optimistic. The narrator suggests that the mother envied Lucy, but I think it was the other way around; Lucy envied her sister and her lifestyle, because Lucy lost her confidence in happiness, and that made her sad. Once, she loved a man, but after she had gone to see him, she never saw him again, because “The wanting – is everything” (l.116) Once you get what you want, what you long for, it is spoiled. Picture 1: “The Kiss”, painted by Gustav Klimt, a man and a woman kiss each other, surrounded by flowers and a kind of golden glow. This could illustrate the wanting that Aunt Lucy describes. Everyone knows that a real kiss is not surrounded by a golden light, but it is what you could imagine it to be, what you want it to be. That is why the wanting is so much better than having.

Lucy seems like an old woman who has lost faith in life itself. She is tired of her lifestyle, because everything she did was for other people, and now that she has lost her husband and her children have grown up, she is alone with nothing to do. She is old and maybe she feels like she has nothing to live for. Her attitude towards life matches the attitude of text 4: “Affirmation” by Donald Hall. This text has a feel of despair, because it describes growing old the way it does. It almost lists the course of life in its 25 lines and it does so in a way that makes life seem dull and not worth living. Growing old is an inevitable thing, and love is something that does not last, so are friends. It is almost as if the text is saying “Why bother?” to all these things, because they will eventually disappear anyway. Happiness is not something that will last, so why try to have it in the first place?

At the end of the text, the narrator finally cries, although she had not been able to at her mother’s funeral. She cries for her mother and also for her mother’s sister, because one wanted happiness and died, and the other knows it is impossible. She also cries for herself “for what I couldn’t see, and for what I cannot understand” (l.154). The thing she could not see might have been that her aunt’s life was not really as perfect and happy as she thought it had been, and what she cannot understand might refer to her aunt not believing in happiness. Happiness might, for the narrator, be something essential, something that must be believed in, whether it exists or not. It is unbearable to live life if there is nothing to believe in, and that might be the message of this text.

The text shows us how the death of a loved one affects us, not only because of the sorrow, but also because of the thoughts that occurs to us afterwards. Would Aunt Lucy’s life have been different if she had not been married for so many years? It might have been, but she will never know.

2. Short essay with examples of metaphors in the poem “Affirmation” and comments on their use.

In the poem “Affirmation” by Donald Hall the metaphors are used to underline the feeling of despair that might come with age. He describes youth with the following metaphor: “Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content” (ll.6-7). He compares youth to rowing on a pond, and it seems almost ironic, because it seems so pointless to spend ones youth rowing around in a pond that leads nowhere.

Later on, he describes marriage: “But a marriage, that began without harm, scatters into debris on a shore” (ll.7-9). A marriage cannot scatter into debris, so this is another metaphor, and a strong one at that, because it gives a very visual image of how marriages rarely lasts and often end with a fight, just like disagreements with old friends can lead to an estrangement: “Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years”. (ll.21-22)

At the end of the poem, Donald Hall writes: “Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything”(ll.23-25) This could be a metaphor saying that one just has to come to terms with the fact that everyone will grow old and lose everything (friends, family, lovers) and that if that is accepted, life will be easier to accept, because one knows that it will happen eventually.