Analysis Of Stone Soup By Barbara Kingsolver

As of 2015 the U.S Census Bureau revealed that approximately 116 million families are living in the United States. These families possess their own unique style, culture and set of beliefs. My family, consisting of my married parents and my older sister, are no different in the aspect that we too hold our own set of beliefs. The socially constructed term ‘family’ traditionally is defined as a unit that is related by marriage or blood, share financial responsibilities and care for any children/dependents (Lofquist et al., 2012). Growing up as a Haitian American, my ideas of what it means to be a family have been greatly influenced by my cultures and my religion. The Haitian culture greatly emphasizes family relationships and familial

Barbara Kingsolver’s essay “Stone Soup” is about how a family should be like. The ideal family has a mother, father, sister and a junior. Kingsolver writes how she thought her family would be perfect. She says that people assume that children with divorced parents are unhappy. Single parents, gay parents, and remarried parents are not the ideal family but that is ok.

Family. What do you picture? Two married parents, their son and daughter, and maybe a dog, all living in a two story house in a nice suburban neighborhood. And who should blame you for picturing that? It’s been drilled into our minds all throughout our childhoods. Through our families, the tv, the books we read. But is this really all true? 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce and of that 50 percent, 46 percent are families. So why is this “perfect” family ideal so widespread? Author Barbara Kingsolver tries to explain this in her essay: ‘Stone Soup’. She claims it’s because society is so traditional and primitive in the way we idealize what a family is supposed to be: two married parents and their children. But that’s not really the case anymore. The main idea of her essay is that the definition of family needs to be reimagined to define more of what a family means, rather than what its terminology implies.

To get a full understanding of family theory one must first have the understanding of what is theory. Theory is a systematic collection of concepts and relations. Family however can mean a broad range of things to a person. One person may consider family to be father, mother, sister and brother; however, to someone else family could be just one parent with one child; and to another it could their friends. Family systems theory however defines the family as a system. Family consist of interrelated parts, each impacting the other and adding to each other’s growth (or detriment) of the other. And because family is always changing, growing, self-organizing, and becoming accustomed to each other and the exterior environment (White & Klein, 2008). Now let’s take a look at the

Barbara Kingsolver’s “Stone Soup” is a personal response to society’s view of the “broken” family. Kingsolver believes that society has for too long criticized divorce, remarriage, single parenthood, gay parents, and blended families, and that alternative families deserve equal standing in our society. In response to reading Kingsolver’s essay, this paper will serve to show which parts of “Stone Soup” are supported by outside evidence and which are not.

In today’s society, family is often attempted to be organized within a social structure. Within this structure family typically is consisted of mom, dad, daughter, and son. However, many families do not fit into this configuration. These families may include same sex couples, separated or divorced families, extended families, or even blended families. Even though these families may be happy and healthy, to many they are not considered real families. Going along with the topic of imperfect families, both Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Rodriguez try to break down the traditional family structure through their writing. While Kingsolver’s “Stone Soup” and Rodriguez’s “Family Values” explore the ideas of different family structures and traditional American values, “Stone Soup” breaks down what an actual family is like while “Family Values” expresses the value of family in different cultures.

Are mothers in prison not good mothers? Are all divorced families unhappy? Are these myths true? Myths are traditionally false beliefs or ideas. In other words, there are mothers in prison who love their children and there are divorced families who are better off separated. Many people believe in myths that cannot be proven. In the essay, “The Long Good-Bye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”, Amanda Coyne writes about her visit to see her sister at the Federal Prison Camp. She describes the environment in which the inmates live their day-to-day lives and even though these “convict-moms” are locked up and separated from their children, they still care and show them love (Coyne 56). In the article, “Stone Soup”, Barbara Kingsolver writes about how in today’s society a divorced marriage equals a “broken” family (66). She feels that even though a couple might be divorced, there can still be a “happy ending”. Both authors are able to dismantle these myths by

A family consists of people with mutual respect, love, and passions for one another, conveys Barbara Kingsolver in her essay called the “Stone Soup”. She believes that a family isn’t necessarily bound by traditional concepts of happy marriages, rather she insists that this is a relatively new ideal in our society. A nuclear family is a representation of normal families; Kingsolver disagrees with this concept, and understands that today's norm are the non traditional families of the world. She writes this essay reminding non traditional families that there is nothing they need be ashamed of, ascertaining the parents that their families are complete

An example of how her family values each other is her description of the conventions and norms of her family. They are thoroughly supportive of one another, attending every graduation, baby shower, birthday, and house warming party. Her father and siblings have burial plots together so that they are never separated. Life is lived with everyone being connected and concerned for not only each person’s well-being, but happiness as well. She says her “relatives form an alliance that represents a genuine and enduring love of family…”

The circumstances in which the modern world faces are more unique and diverse than ever before. Slavery has been abolished, women’s rights have been achieved, depressions have been conquered, wars have been fought, minorities are lawfully considered equal, and gay and other martial freedoms are coming forth. The most logical circumstances have always been around and known to be true through nature. Humans are a social breed and strive for a sole companion but, none-the-less, we are animals designed to survive and re-populate. Our increased life expectancy and uncontestable ability to manifest our own happiness only provides more inconsistency when it comes to our families. We weren’t meant to be together for years and years, we were just meant to be together. Where the line is draw is left completely up to us as the individual. As Kingslover states, “If there is a normal for humans, at all, I expect it looks like two or three Families of Dolls, connected variously by kinship and passion, shuffled like cards and strewn over several shoeboxes.” In conclusion Barbara Kingsolver gets across that it is alright to be different in the field of family and that all families have skeletons in the closet may it be divorce, death, or even a gay member. It is what we do with these so called skeletons that create our true values. So let’s

Everyone has a family of some kind. It may be the parents and siblings they were born with, or it could be the gang of six biologically unrelated elite drivers with an affinity for robbing banks at high speeds from Fast and the Furious. Ultimately, family is what people make of it, and it can be the ‘traditional’ two parents, one brother, one sister, and a dog named Spot, or it could be a woman and the kid she was left with. The term ‘traditional family' refers to the socially expected behaviors of each given role (for example, a mother taking her kid to the doctor,) in the family. Members of a traditional family in this case are either maritally or biologically related. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees has many characters who would consider themselves, or be considered, part of different families. The Bean Trees addresses and deals with the fact that nontraditional families can be just as strong as what society has defined as a ‘traditional’ family.

American novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, in her excerpt, “Stone Soup”, taken from, High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never, recounts the outrageous view that society has on divorced families/homes. Kingsolver’s purpose is to impress upon readers that it is okay for families to stem away from the traditional, “Dad, Mom, Sis, Junior”, family. She creates a persuasive tone in order to get rid of stereotypes and judgments of marital issues held by her readers and society. Through the effective use of anecdotes, appeals, and passionate diction, Kingsolver establishes her claim that blended families can get through life happy and perfectly fine by themselves or with close friends and family.

Growing up I believed that the three bears in the tale of Goldilocks were a family because they lived under the same roof and ate at the same table. I also believed that Barbie and her little sister, Skipper, were family because they looked alike, and that Mr. Potato Head and Mrs. Potato Head were family because they were married. Now that I am grown, my understanding of family has matured, and many sources have helped shape my belief. Carol Shields points out in her article, “Family Is One of the Few Certainties We Will Take with Us Far into the Future,” that all around us there are different definitions and symbols of family (Shields 558). In short, a family does not have to conform to

Family means many things to different people, yet the word itself can bring about a host of emotions from anyone who hears the word uttered. As a child growing up in the 60s and 70s the family dynamic was defined by the people we grew up with were related to by blood, and extended to the many family members of the different generations that made up the family unit.

In the story Everyday Use by Alice Walker, talks about family of culture. “Maggie will be nervous after her sister goes: She will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister had held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never learned to say to her.” This means that Maggie is shy and quiet while also jealous of her sister Dee, thinking that Dee has always had everything. I can connect to this quote because there was many times where I got jealous of my sister because she had better things than me. “Instead, Mira married an Indian student in 1962 who was getting his business administration degree at Wayne State University. They soon acquired the labor certifications necessary for the green card of hassle-free residence and employment.” This means that she married someone with the same ethnicity as her, her sister did not. I know someone who did the exact same thing as Mira and Bharati. Overall family can affect how you view others in the world and how you view