After completing my summary of Showalter's chapter 19 from Jury, I expected to be reading a Vietnam War story from Bobbi Ann Mason. I was neither surprised or disappointed to find out that Shiloh was not a war story.
From the beginning we see the struggles between husband and wife. The husband used to be a long haul trucker who was gone the majority of their marriage. The wife enjoyed her time at home alone and when the husband became injured and had to stay at home all the time, the strain on their marriage was overwhelming. The mother in the story does not help matters at all. The wife already feels like she has no privacy from her mother because she is always dropping in and spending tons of time at the house, but now she also has no alone time from her husband.
The husband just wants to please the wife, but as most husbands :) is clueless as to how to achieve his goal. He wants to build her a log cabin which is the last thing the wife wants. All she wants is some time alone!
When the couple goes to the Shiloh battlefield for a day trip, the setting could not be more appropriate for their fight to play out. The battlefield setting gives them the perfect backdrop for their disintegrating marriage.
I think that this story was very interesting and I loved reading it, I look forward to reading more from this author.
I could not agree with you more! I (accidently) did chapter 19, and I was surprised at the Shiloh story not being a war story. I thought it was fuunny how you said husbands are clueless when it comes to making their wives happy.... I totally agree!!
ReplyDeleteIn chapter 19, the multiculturalism section stood out to me. In this section, Showalter discusses generational conflicts, particularly between mothers and saughters, and the difficulties and disadvantages of assimilation to American mainstream. Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club fits into this multiculturalism section perfectly! After reading the book, I see how different and difficult it had to be for a Chinese American young girl to be raised under her parents' Chinese culture. American and Chinese culture are two different cultures that probably would not mesh very well.
I enjoyed doing this chapter even though I was not assigned to it.
Also, with this being my last post, I want to talk a little about the paper and what I am finding interesting about it and what I am struggling with. First of all the topic was the hardest thing for me to come up with!!! I don't know what happened, but I got serious writers block there for a while. But now that I have my topic,, I am flowing along really well, with the exception of redundancy, and how coherent my paper actually is. Hopefully the end result will be what I want it to be:)