In the main section I’ll be talking about how the stories are written. Both of the stories were written by females. The form they are written in is different. “Your Shoes” is written like a letter to her daughter asking her to come back, however “The Parvenue” is written as more of a conventional short story.
Both stories make use of first person narration, both feature emotional and naïve narrators and also these contradict themselves.
The structure of these tragic stories are that we don’t know what exactly happens at the end. “The Parvenue” we don’t know if she dies or goes to Susan in America, similarily in “Your Shoes” we don’t know if the daughter comes back or not. The effect of this is when she says, “ There, my darling, there. You’re at home with mother, everything’s all right. I knew you’d come back, I knew you’d come back to me.” This shows that she might be hugging the shoes as if they are her daughter, because she has them with her in the bed.
The shoes are personified and an extended metaphor.
She’s comparing those shoes to her daughter by hugging and kissing them. The writer has used personification all the way. The mother ties the shoes laces together representing the fact that the mother wants her daughter back and doesn’t want to be lost.
In The Parvenue “I desire to die” is a melodramatic style. This is where she thinks that if she should die, or go to her sister Susan in America, but she does not want to go to America because that’s not her kind of place. (commiting suicide)
In “The Parvenue” the narrator says that she had a happy childhood, whereas “ Your Shoes” did not have a good relationship with her daughter. In “Your Shoes” she stays close with her father whereas in“The Parvenue” her father was almost blackmailing her because the father asks her daughter for money. He said that if you don’t give it, there might be a chance of your mother dying.
The husband took her abroad and she did not like it. Then the husband gave her money to spend on herself, but she gave it to her family or the poor. The husband does not like this at all. “It was not till my return to England that the full disaster crushed me”. This shows that when she went abroad and came back to England the pressure gained on her from both sides, her family and her husband.
The narrator in “The Parvenue” who is the mother is a young woman. She is middle aged. However, in “Your Shoes” the mother or the narrator is fairly old. “I locked the wardrobe on those rebellious shoes” This suggests that this quote is a metaphor and she is comparing her daughter to a pair of shoes. She is talking to them as if she is the pair of shoes, but this shows that she wants her daughter back soon.
In “Your Shoes” she tells the story like a letter, however in “The Parvenue” she writes it more of a conventional short story. This shows that these both narrators have a different understanding and purposes. The effect of “Your Shoes” is to make the story more personal.
In “The Parvenue” social class is important and you must marry people from a similar background. The role of woman was different. They were treated as inferior. They were expected to stay home and look attractive. Also in “Your Shoes” the women have jobs and also lots of family conflict, because the men are at work always absent men.
In this conclusion “Your Shoes” is about a mother’s daughter who has ran away because her dad called her a dirty slut because he thinks that the daughter does bad stuff like being a prostitute, drinking and smoking whereas “The Parvenue” is about a working class lady who married an upper class man. This illustrates two very unhappy woman going through lots of problems both at a similar stage.