I can relate to the character Emily, fretting about your appearance when you're a child. Wondering why everyone else looks different, and what how you think you should have looked.
I have a question. When Emily came back to her mother at the age of two, she never proceeded to find out why Emily's personality and appearance had changed from staying with her fathers family. I just wonder, did something happen to her while she stayed with them?
This short story really differs from "Night thoughts" and "Live-in cook". Here we have a mother on her own at first trying to take care of her daughter, which we would call normal. While the other two main characters in the other stories were men who took on a woman's role, with the cleaning and taking care of others.
Think about how old EMily was when her mother had to send her to live with the father's family. Is the mother a single parent throughout the entire story? It is interesting, and this is a default manner in which our society talks about childcare and domestic work, but it the two male characters in the two previous stories we read took on "a woman's role", does the single mother in this story take on both the "woman's role" and the "man's role"?
ReplyDeleteI dont think something happen to Emily while she was staying with her fathers family. When emily went to stay with them she was just a baby.. when she returned she was 2 years old. How can she remember anything about her mother, to Emily her mother is really a stranger. Later on in the story Emily get sent away again and the relationship between her mother and her becomes nonexistent. I dont believe emily's mother played both parent, because she was just a kid herself when she had Emily. She had no idea how to care for her so whenever Emily became a handful she would ship her way.
DeleteIs it because Emily is a "handful" that the mother sends her to the father's family? Why is later Emily sent to a convalescence home?
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