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“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”

 This story was very compelling to me right off the bat, mostly because I personally adore urban fantasy. However, I was also pretty enthralled by the themes of the piece as I read it. It has themes of assimilationism and its effects, especially given that the girls are in schools run by the Catholic Church. The girls were given new, proper names and were expected to become fully human because it was better. However, this had largely negative effects on the girls. This is best shown in how they treat Mirabella - Claudette outright says that if they were still with their pack the girls would never treat her like they are, but they are all too focused on becoming “good” humans to actually care that she is being mistreated by both the nuns and them. Even so, Mirabella still tries to help Claudette at the dance, and Claudette responds by blaming her and getting her sent away from the school because Claudette didn’t want to stand up or thank her.  Something especially poignant I found about
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“Barbie Doll”

 The first few lines of this poem made me think that it would be primarily about the toys, and how gender roles work in them. It was a bit surprising that it shifted so quickly into growing up and body image and sexualization, but not that surprising given how often Barbies are used in arguments about them. The next two stanzas are about how she grew up with a lot of positive traits, but the only thing that anyone seemed to care about were her two supposed flaws, her “fat nose on thick legs” (11). This, again, is not particularly surprising. Having one or two prominent negative traits makes it very easy for everyone to zero in on them to the point where you think that they are much worse than they are because of how often they are pointed out. It is especially ironic to me that in the last stanza everyone is focusing on her beauty at her funeral, which I suppose is the point. This is emphasized with all of the sexual imagery - she is laying on satin, “with the undertaker’s cosmetics pa
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“The Story of an Hour”

 When I was reading this, it was very surprising to me when I realized that Louise was happy that her husband was dead. She had been grieving him before that, and so it came a bit out of nowhere. It almost got more shocking when I realized that there was no real reason for her to be that happy at first glance - her husband wasn’t abusive, he wasn’t cruel or negligent, and in fact he “had never looked save with love upon her” (266). Those are reasons that I, at least, would expect from that kind of reaction. But as I kept reading, her actual reasons made sense. It wasn’t that Louise hated her husband, or that she wasn’t genuinely grieving him earlier, but the idea of having her freedom after a lifetime without it was so euphoric that it overpowered everything else.  I think that this was a realistic way of how someone would actually react in this situation. The care is there, but still resenting the level of power that someone else has over you for no good reason. Being sad that they’re
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“The Yellow Wallpaper”

 I found this piece to be very interesting and compelling largely because of the amount of times I recognized what was happening to be a contemporary problem as well as, evidently, a historical one. The narrator is suffering from a mental illness, but her husband (a doctor) refuses to believe that there is anything wrong with her aside formo a “slight hysterical tendency” (302), which her brother (also a doctor) agrees with. Because she isn’t believed, she isn’t getting any kind of treatment. Male doctors refusing to believe that women are sick, both mentally and physically, and them suffering for it has been a problem apparently since the beginning of the profession, and I have heard many real stories that were basically the same from people today. I was also interested in this story because from what I know about mental illness (admittedly not that much, and mostly anecdotal), John is handling the narrator’s treatment all wrong. John has decided her treatment should be primarily rest
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A RAISIN IN THE SUN - Play and Movie

 The changes that the movie made to the play largely added to the story by putting in details that the play form was unable to.  The brief scenes of Walter working at his job and discussing the deal with his friends at the bar made his character stronger. The audience got a better idea of how his situation affected him and how desperate he was for the deal to go through earlier in the story. Walter and Mama’s conversation happening at the bar also seemed to make it more significant - Mama is seeing Walter making bad decisions but is still choosing to trust him. The contrast between this trust and Walter’s later choices is much stronger when she is trusting him more. The choice to have a scene where they visit the house that they bought was also very good. Especially since they combined it with the part where they gave Mama their gifts and put it before they met Lindner rather than after, as it is in the play version. Seeing how nice the new house is, especially in comparison to their a
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“Wildwood”

 I found the way that the complex family dynamics are portrayed in this story very interesting. In most media that I’ve seen, both parties are genuinely trying their best, and there’s usually some kind of generational trauma at play. Even when they aren’t and one party is pretty clearly abusive, like in “Wildwood”, this is often the case from what I’ve seen. However, in this story the mother is straight up cruel for no real reason. Even at the moment when she falls and we think that she will start showing that she actually cares about Lola, it was just a trick. The resolution of the story was that Lola had to move completely away from her mother into a different country to heal from what she did to her, which is an unusual ending for a story.
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“Hills Like White Elephants”

 After I read this piece, I was very reminded of the Theatre of the Absurd, and especially the premise of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot - I’ve never read or seen the play, but I do know of it. The premise is that two men are sitting and talking while waiting for someone named Godot to arrive, which never actually happens. This piece seems very similar to it - two people are sitting and talking while waiting for a train that never actually arrives. It was also interesting in that works from the Theatre of the Absurd are known for being circular, which “White Elephants” also is - the whole story is talking around the subject of the woman’s pregnancy and potential abortion without actually coming to a resolution about what they would do about it, ending in the same place they began. On the other hand, the feeling that I got about Waiting for Godot  was that nothing that happened actually had any impact, while here they are discussing what is a very real and important issue to them, e
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