A Dead Woman 's Secret

In the story “Killings” by Andre Dubus, a mother has to deal with the heartbreaking, sudden loss of her young son. The story only provides brief glimpses of how Ruth, the mother, copes with this; whereas the film, In the Bedroom, helps provide a much better perspective of how depressed and misguided Ruth is over this loss. In “Killings”, Ruth is a protective mother who only wants the best for her son, she encourages Frank to discontinue fraternizing with Mary Ann, in fear it will interfere with his future. Although in the story Ruth attempts to place responsibility on those around her, the film In the Bedroom sheds light on how she feels she is responsible for her son's death.

The short story presents women as aware but misunderstood by men through use of narrative point of view. In society women are usually seen as inferior to men, and therefore often don’t get the acknowledgement they deserve. “The women held their secrets because when they mentioned it to their husbands or brothers they were laughed at….Instead of sympathy, the husbands and brothers now had a secret weapon”. This shows that women did not share their fears as it gave others ideas to torment them further. Women in the short story are also shown to be fully aware of the boy’s behaviour early on in the story. “The men of his home town said, but how

The author starts the book with the story of her aunt. This story was a well-kept family secret being that her aunt’s actions were of great disappointment to the family. The “no name woman” as the story names her, was forgotten by all her family because she had a child that was not from her husband. This story gives a clear

In P.D. Cacek’s short story “The Grave”, Elizabeth, the protagonist, resents bad mothers and their cruel treatment towards their children because Elizabeth is a bad mother. In the start of the story, Elizabeth notices a forgotten grave and immediately jumps to the conclusion that the grave belongs to a bad mother. As time passes, she tries to find reasons to disprove her statement but fails. As she gets home, the reader is introduced to Elizabeth’s mother, and this relationship illustrates the tension between to two. When it’s almost time to sleep, it is revealed to the reader that as Elizabeth leaves the grave, she dug up Precious' body and only recovers the skull. There are numerous examples of what happens when a parent fail in their job

As a young woman, Denver is lonely and terrified. She knows that, "her mother had secrets -- things she wouldn't tell; things she halfway told" (38). These secrets, she understands, are

The character of the mother executes the tell-tale signs of counterfeit happiness when she tells the murderous story of the narrator’s father’s brother. “‘Oh honey,’ she said, ‘there’s a lot that you don’t know. But you are going to find out’” (36).

It looks like the author’s purpose of this story is to make readers think and decide on their own what really happened to that woman.

Through character development, the story also portrays the theme of escaping the past. Sethe’s actions are influenced heavily by her dead child, Beloved. When the “human” form of Beloved arrives while sleeping

And so does her body, which is laid in her grave. The father now asks the heavy and dark earth in the last line that it should cover her body very gentle and with this picture we get an even sadder ending.

In "A Sorrowful Woman" the wife is depressed with her life, so much so, "The sight of them made her so sad and sick she did not want to see them ever again"(p.1). This wife and mother has come to detest her life, the sight of her family,

Gail Godwin’s Sorrowful Woman develops the message that the archetypal role of mother and wife is so constricting and limiting as to force ‘the mother’ character to end her life. The end of the story demonstrates the power of rhetoric, contrast, and detached narration in creating the text’s message.

This story is about a wife named Louise Mallard who has heart trouble, so she must be informed carefully about her husband’s death. Her sister, Josephine, is unfortunately the one who has to break the news to newly widowed wife. One of her husband’s friends, Richard, learned about her husband’s death when he was reading the newspaper and heard about the crashing of a train that Brently was on. Louise is devastated when she learns of her husband’s death and runs upstairs to be alone. Louise sits down and ponders about life while looking out the window and hears a vendor yelling what he is selling. Still crying, she looks into the distance wondering what’s next. She is nervous for her life ahead and doesn’t know what she is going to do without her husband. She starts to think about what life is going to be like without having anyone telling her what to do, when to do it, or how to do it. She starts to feel warm inside knowing she is finally free. Louise knows she will become overcome with emotions when she is forced to see Brently’s body. She imagines the years

It was as if she had died with so much life in her that this world she’d been cast into as a member of the conscious dead couldn’t fully contain her, it couldn’t fully make her one of them. Don’t get me wrong… she was slightly gray in tone and her eyes at times had that distant look that so many of us have, but there was something else. She didn’t have any of the signs of a true corpse; she moved differently, almost flowed, where most of us are rigid and jerky. And, she smiled more, still filled with optimism like she could conquer the world, whereas the rest of our kind emitted a sense of self-loathing, pity, and hopelessness.

The term femicide had been in use long before Diana E.H. Russell reintroduced it to modern lexicon. In fact, it was first used in A Satirical View of London at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century in 1801 to notate the killing of a woman. Shortly after, in 1827, a manuscript by the name of The Confessions of an Unexecuted Femicide was published that details the murder of a young women by William MacNivish. Additionally, the word femicide appeared in Wharton 's Law Lexicon in 1848, suggesting that it had become a criminal offense. (Russell 2001). Even before this inclusion, however, was the social control of women through the witch-crazy in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Rooted in the desire to eradicate heresy and reinstate fellowship to the Catholic Church, whose view on women and gender is largely based on the creation story in Genesis. The universally known story of Adam and Eve preaches the danger in the sexual insatiability of women, and Russell states that, “It was particularly female sexuality that made women sinful... and led men into damnation through association with their bodies,” (Russell 1992:28). Therefore, by inducing fear of violent interrogation, imprisonment, and sentencing to death (only to women, remember), the witch-craze was a tool for imparting social control over the women and can now be looked back upon as femicide. The use of violence against women by men was reliant on a construct of female sexuality, and the ways in which they

The mothers name is Larry; she’s 40-year old and divorced. She works as a bereavement counselor and she lives with her two daughters, Rachel and Flora. Larry is described as a very unnoticeable woman, who does her best to avoid conflict and confrontation. Example from the text: “whispered the mother, who wanted life to be calm, a flat sea with no sudden breezes. She liked emotions to be explored in safe rooms, with a clock”. It means that she wants her family to appear happy, so all these emotions should be explored at home where nobody else can see it.