Your Shoes - analyse four of the main characters; the Narrator, the Narrator's Daughter, the Narrator's Mother and the Narrator's Husband.
Your Shoes
I will be analysing four of the main characters; the Narrator, the Narrator's Daughter, the Narrator's Mother and the Narrator's Husband. I will be judging them on the basis of the Narrators comments and our perceptions and speculations of the characters.
The Narrator seems very mentally troubled. She appears to have bottled up her feelings and is letting them out in random outbursts of emotion.
My first impressions of the Narrator are that she is a 'control freak'. The Narrator's daughter has run away, and this appears to have distressed the narrator. From what we know the narrator's daughter has run away because her Mother, and possibly her Father have tried to control her and tell her what to do. The daughter's parents have given her no freedom and this has just caused the daughter become more distant and rebellious. I believe the narrator has been living her life through her daughter, and her disappearance has caused the narrator to loose the plot.
I think the narrator feels resentment against her daughter for deserting her, but what the narrator doesn't seem to calculate is that her disappearance is partly down to her. "Now I realise you kept yourself from me, how I didn't really know you at all". The narrator feels angry and jealous, and as far as we know the narrator did not enjoy her childhood, so I think she feels angry because the narrator thinks the daughter gets so much and she is just throwing it back in their faces, ungratefully. Although the narrator feels the daughter is very lucky to get what she gets, I feel she is deprived. "Oh you used to be so unkind to me . Throwing my presents back in my face."
The author drops occasional hints to say that possibly the daughter was a mistake, or may belong to another man however much the narrator insists she loves her. For example "Of course I wanted you. Of course I loved you." Here the narrator is just letting her feelings pour out, there is no structure to this story.
The narrator has a, in my opinion, a misperceived childhood. She thinks that she was deprived as a child, and that her brother was always favourite and her mother never loved her. She worshipped her father, who like her husband, seems very patriarchal. The narrator is constantly comparing her mother to her daughter. "My mother was like you, she liked a drink". The narrator thinks the behaviour of her mother, and daughter is disgusting but we think that her mother seems like a nice lady who 'likes a laugh'. The narrator thinks her mother never showed her any ...
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The narrator has a, in my opinion, a misperceived childhood. She thinks that she was deprived as a child, and that her brother was always favourite and her mother never loved her. She worshipped her father, who like her husband, seems very patriarchal. The narrator is constantly comparing her mother to her daughter. "My mother was like you, she liked a drink". The narrator thinks the behaviour of her mother, and daughter is disgusting but we think that her mother seems like a nice lady who 'likes a laugh'. The narrator thinks her mother never showed her any love and preferred her brother, hence why she was so close to her father, but there is no evidence to show her mother felt this way. I think the narrator is very disturbed, and misperceives everything, in her own, twisted word.
The narrator always defends her husband, as she compares him to her father, who she loved, and always tried to impress. We see both men as patriarchal characters who seem to be typical mid 20th century males, and think it is the woman's' job to do all the work etc. She defends her husband over her daughter because her husband reminds her of her father who she worshipped. "Of course you father was angry. After all this is his house. You shouldn't have got so upset. I'm sure he didn't mean all of what he said.
Because her daughter has run away, the narrator seems to pretend that the new shoes, that she bought her, that were "thrown back in my face", are real and treats them like she should have treated her daughter and given them the love she didn't give her daughter. "I hold you to my breast and rock you like my mother never rocked me....laces like strings of liquorice. They taste so sweet. The narrator realises she has lost her daughter and treats the shoes like her daughter, she is very disturbed, living in a world of her own.
The narrator is very strange, she misperceives things and lives in a world of her own. The loss of her daughter has shaken her, and she has many emotions of anger, jealousy and frustration, which she is releasing in random outbursts, there is no structure. She had a bad childhood, in her mind and passes this on to her daughter causing her to run away, she is a control freak and gave the daughter no freedom. The narrator has many problems, she lives in a twisted world.
The narrators husband seems to be very patriarchal, he isn't mentioned very often but is defended vigorously by the narrator.
The narrator's husband seems to be very traditional, he seems to think that he is the man of the house and therefore rules the place. It is not clear when this is set, but may be quite a few years ago as this type of household was then accepted widely. It seems to me as if the husband does not treat the daughter very well but the narrator still sticks up for him because she considers him similar to her father.
The narrator thinks highly of her husband, although she admits she married him "on the rebound". "He's been a good husband, a good father". We can speculate that the daughter may have not been her husbands but another man's, Pete's. She may have only married her husband to cover up the fact that she was having an illegitimate baby, which would have disgraced her father, whom she always tried to impress. "Of course I never told my mother I wasn't a virgin, she'd have had fifty fits. My father would have killed me if he'd known".
The narrator's husband, seems to be very mean to the daughter, however the narrator is constantly defending him. "When your father called you a dirty slut he didn't mean for you to take it personally". The father seems to be quite short-tempered and bad-mouthed but the narrator refuses to accept any of this and doesn't realise that this is the cause of the daughter's disappearance.
The husband is not mentioned much but what we do know is that he has taken everything out on the daughter and caused her to run away. He is a very typical, patriarchal man and the narrator refuses to side against him. He has been very rude to the daughter, and has been strict and not given her any freedom.
The daughter is referred to a lot, but is not actually mentioned directly by the author. This piece is aimed at the daughter. The daughter is made out by the mother to be very rebellious and troublesome but what the mother doesn't realise is that this is mainly her and her husbands fault.
The daughter has run away. The mother feels hatred, anger and jealousy towards her daughter. I feel that the daughter is mislead. Her parents insistence on keeping a firm eye on her and giving her no freedom has just made her want to push them away. The mother feels that daughter is being ungrateful, she is full of mixed feelings that are just pouring out. She says on thing and then another. "I couldn't believe you could be so unkind, so ungrateful.....of course I loved you" etc. The narrator is a typical strict mother that has taken things too far, she dislike her daughters friends, looks through her personal stuff - her mother is a control freak and that is what has caused the daughter to run away.
The daughter is not as bad as her mother makes out, I just think she is mislead, her parents have tried to control to much which is bound to make her rebel and push them away - its life.
The narrators mother is shown as a slut. The narrator obviously still feels hatred towards her form her childhood and makes her out as an alcoholic, smoking tart.
The narrator, does not give off a good image of her mother. She obviously feels resentment towards her and blames her for her bad childhood. "He (her father) shouldn't have married her, he should have chosen someone like himself. Then I might have had a better childhood". The narrator compares her mother to her daughter, and feels she is better than that, she is like her father or so she says. "My mother was like you, she liked a drink. She like to do the housework with a cigarette in her mouth, then she'd put her feet up and have a gin and tonic".
The narrator is jealous of her brother and her daughter, she felt as if her mother preferred her brother and was always nice to her daughter, this is very childish - "She loved you more than she loved me. It isn't fair".
We feel as if the mother is a nice character, someone who knows how to have a god time, a laugh. We get the opposite perception of the mother, to what the narrator thinks of her. The reason the narrator was so close to her father was because she felt her mother didn't love her, whether this is true we just don't know. What we do know is that the narrator is living in a twisted world and misperceives everything.
This is a very effective story written in a colloquial style. The narrator has so many different feelings running around inside her, the story is an explosion of emotion. She has mixed feelings of hatred, guilt, resentment, jealousy and she just pours them all out, some of her darkest secrets included. The author drops several hints leaking that the daughter may not be the narrators husbands and that she only married he husband for the sake of it. She resents her daughter and mother because the daughter is compared to her mother, who she never like because she thought, in her twisted world, that she preferred her brother. She defends her husband because she compares him to her father who she always loved, who accepted her and loved her - said she had a bright future, gave her hope which is what every child needs. The twisted world in which the narrator lives is quite confusing, she is mentally unstable, and is just comforting herself with a pair of shoes - the daughters shoes - your shoes!
