The Brooch

The relationship between Amy and Howard is strange in this story. At first they seem to love each other, and cannot wait to be married, but then Howard becomes jealous and gets violent, and spanks her. It seems as though she was almost forced into marrying him because after his display of aggression she gives in and marries him, when before she had had complaints. Control is a major issue in this story. Clearly the mother is controling. Her son has absolutely no ability to make his own decisions, or even leave the house, even though he is an adult. He sacrifices his own happiness with Amy in order to keep his mother happy. The ironic part is she cannot even get out of bed. It is hard to see what he is afraid of, when she is basically powerless. It may be the guilt of her simply being his mother, as several times he says he just cannot leave her and he will not. I do not know if I could leave my mother either.
Although she clearly is the controling one, he ends up exercising control in his own way too. He decides that Amy must live in the house with his mother, even though she begs not to. In the end he basically decides the relationship is over by having her leave to the hotel. He makes her live a certain way in order to keep his mother happy. In the end he cannot bear it and ends up alone. In this story nobody wins, the mom ends up without her son, the very thing she was trying to control the entire time, Howard cannot live at all, and Amy ends up alone in a hotel. It is true in life and relationships that when one tries to control everything it never turns out well.

There Was a Queen

To me this story follows a theme pattern that has been ongoing as we move forward through American Literature. The further we go the more acceptable it is for interracial relationships to occur. Before the civil war African Americans were just slaves, even after the war racial tensions were high. For exmaple in "Desiree's Baby" when the husband believes his wife to be black he disowns her. Clearly in this story the relationship between Narcissa and her lover is not ideal, but we can see a trend in the fact that she does it anyway, although the old South would find it highly unacceptable. I do not think mixed racial relationships are the main point of "There Was a Queen", but I do think it is a huge American issue, and to me we can see our racial battle's progress through literature. Literature has a huge effect on society, causing controversy and sparking new ideas. The recurrent mixing racial relationships seen in the works we are reading, and the move toward acceptance tracks our country's journey through it, and shows how writing can make people think.

Williams

Williams’s “The Young Housewife” seems to paint an image of how dismal the life of a housewife can be. It goes along with how many modern day working women would view a housewife, making her out to be shy and working for a man.
First, the poem tells the reader that it is 10 A.M. in the morning, a time when a working woman would be at work, and the housewife is “behind the wooden walls of her husband’s house” (lines 2-3). Behind wooden walls makes her sound trapped and enclosed. And the fact that Williams calls it her husband house shows that she is living via her husband. This type of relationship does not imply equality but more that the husband owns the house, and she is confined in it, working for him.
The next stanza talks about her going to meet with various public service men and she is “shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of hair” (lines 7-8). She is not confident in her own skin as she seems shy and timid around these men. Women wear corsets to shape their bodies into an ideal figure. The fact that she is shy and timid in relation to not having her body shaped right shows a lack of personality strength and makes it seems as though she is living to meet some man’s ideal, and is uncomfortable when she does not.
Williams likens her to a “fallen leaf” (line 9) and at the end of the poem speaks of his “rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves” (lines 10-11). Peter Baker of the Modern American Poetry asks “is the woman something crushed or discarded?” This is what the poem seems to be saying to me to. Today, with so many opportunities for women, a housewife does not look so glamorous, and Williams portrays her as a weak character, shy and timid, working for his husband in his house. At the end she is nothing but a fallen leaf that is crunched and discarded by the wheels of a car.