By Willa Sibert Cather
I RECEIVED one morning a letter, written in pale ink, on glassy, blue-lined note-paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had been carried for some days in a coat-pocket that was none too clean, was from my Uncle Howard. It informed me that his wife had been left a small legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it had become necessary for her to come to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station, and render her whatever services might prove necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I found it no later than to-morrow. He had characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.
The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure, at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of recollections so wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and raw from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organ, thumbing the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she beside me made canvas mittens for the huskers.
The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and when I got her into the carriage she looked not unlike one of those charred, smoked bodies that firemen lift from the débris of a burned building. She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black with soot and her black bonnet gray with dust during the journey. When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at once, and I did not see her again until the next morning.
Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance she considerately concealed. Myself, I saw my aunt's misshapened figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music-teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter sixties. One summer, which she had spent in the little village in the Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of those absurd and extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in a plain, angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her; and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who of course had no money, took a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they measured off their eighty acres by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates usually reverted to the conditions of primitive savagery. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead.
But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have been considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the soiled linen duster, which on her arrival was the most conspicuous feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress whose ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor aunt's figure, however, would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker. Her skin was yellow as a Mongolian's from constant exposure to a pitiless wind, and to the alkaline water, which transforms the most transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather. She wore ill-fitting false teeth. The most striking thing about her physiognomy, however, was an incessant twitching of the mouth and eyebrows, a form of nervous disorder resulting from isolation and monotony, and from frequent physical suffering.
In my boyhood this affliction had possessed a sort of horrible fascination for me, of which I was secretly very much ashamed, for in those days I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way, and had a reverential affection for her. During the three winters when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking three meals for half a dozen farm-hands, and putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing-board, hearing me at the kitchen table beside her recite Latin declensions and conjugations, and gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespere; and her old text-book of mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me my scales and exercises, too, on the little parlor organ which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument except an accordion, that belonged to one of the Norwegian farm-hands. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting, while I struggled with the "Harmonious Blacksmith"; but she seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman; she had the consolation of religion; and to her at least her martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once when I had been doggedly beating out some easy passages from an old score of "Euryanthe" I had found among her music-books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, "Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh! dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice be it is not that."
When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival, she was still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick throughout the journey that she had no recollection of anything but her discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but a few hours of nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my study on Newbury Street. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon, to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk together in the straw-thatched cow-shed, and she, because I was more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to me, would tell me of the splendid performance of Meyerbeer's "Huguenots" she had seen in Paris in her youth. At two o'clock the Boston Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner programme, and I intended to take my aunt, though as I conversed with her I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake, I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the long struggle mercifully ended at last. I suggested our visiting the Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain weakling calf, "Old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained, evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was further troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the freshly opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, that would spoil if it were not used directly.
I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their respective situations and had once possessed the piano score of "The Flying Dutchman." I began to think it would have been best to get her back to Red Willow County without waking her, and regretted having suggested the concert.
From the time we entered the concert-hall, however, she was a trifle less passive and inert, and seemed to begin to perceive her surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been dead for a quarter of a century. But again I found how superficially I had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal, separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have seen this same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard faces unshorn, and who stand in the thronged corridors as solitary as though they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon, or in the yellow blaze of the Arizona desert, conscious that certain experiences have isolated them from their fellows by a gulf no haberdasher could conceal.
The audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was only the color contrast of bodices past counting, the shimmer and shading of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer, resisting and yielding: red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, écru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead black shadow of a frock-coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of tube paint on a palette.
When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir of anticipation, and looked with quickening interest down over the rail at that invariable grouping; perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a shadow of change in one's environment. I reminded myself of the impression made on me by the clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-shaded stand-lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the 'cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows; I recalled how, in the first orchestra I had ever heard, those long bow strokes seemed to draw the soul out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out paper ribbon from a hat.
The first number was the Tannhäuser overture. When the violins drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, my Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat-sleeve. Then it was that I first realized that for her this singing of basses and stinging frenzy of lighter strings broke a silence of thirty years, the inconceivable silence of the plains. With the battle between the two motifs, with the bitter frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat. I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, the rain-gullied clay about the naked house; the four dwarf ash-seedlings on which the dishcloths were always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there is the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that stretched to sunset; between, the sordid conquests of peace, more merciless than those of war.
The overture closed. My aunt released my coat-sleeve, but she said nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of thirty years, through the films made little by little, by each of the three hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and her musical education had been broader than that of most music-teachers of a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain melodies of Verdi's. When I had fallen ill with a fever she used to sit by my cot in the evening, while the cool night wind blew in through the faded mosquito-netting tacked over the window, and I lay watching a bright star that burned red above the cornfield, and sing "Home to our mountains, oh, let us return!" in a way fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.
I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying vainly to conjecture what that warfare of motifs, that seething turmoil of strings and winds, might mean to her. Had this music any message for her? Did or did not a new planet swim into her ken? Wagner had been a sealed book to Americans before the sixties. Had she anything left with which to comprehend this glory that had flashed around the world since she had gone from it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughout the numbers from the "Flying Dutchman," though her fingers worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though of themselves they were recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands! They were stretched and pulled and twisted into mere tentacles to hold, and lift, and knead with; the palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and knotted, on one of them a thin worn band that had once been a wedding-ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, I remembered, with quivering eyelids, their services for me in other days.
Soon after the tenor began the Prize Song, I heard a quick-drawn breath, and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her cheeks, and I think in a moment more they were in my eyes as well. It never really dies, then, the soul? It withers to the outward eye only, like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again. My aunt wept gently throughout the development and elaboration of the melody.
During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I questioned my aunt and found that the Prize Song was not new to her. Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp cow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Baireuth, when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom, which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, and singing the Prize Song, while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step, so far as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody. Shortly afterward he had gone to town on the Fourth of July, been drunk for several days, lost his money at a faro-table, ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone.
"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate, Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with well-meant jocularity.
Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth. From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever since you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of reproaches.
"But do you get it, Aunt Georgiana, the astonishing structure of it all?" I persisted.
"Who could?" she said, absently; "why should one?"
The second half of the programme consisted of four numbers from the Ring. This was followed by the forest music from Siegfried, and the programme closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but almost continuously. I was perplexed as to what measure of musical comprehension was left to her, to her who had heard nothing but the singing of gospel hymns in Methodist services at the square frame school-house on Section Thirteen. I was unable to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or worked into bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.
The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what happy islands, or under what skies. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that the Siegfried march, at least, carried her out where the myriad graves are, out into the gray, burying-grounds of the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with hope, and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.
The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. I spoke gently to her. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly, "I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert-hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs, the tall, unpainted house, naked as a tower, with weather-curled boards; the crook-backed ash-seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry, the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.
https://cather.unl.edu/writings/shortfiction/ss011
From Everybody's Magazine, 10 (March 1904): 325-328.
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We can tell that this story is told in first person because they refer to them self as “me”. We can also tell that the relationship between the main character the man that wrote the letter are family members. He refers to the man who wrote the letter as “Uncle Howard” so that would make the main character the nephew of the man that wrote the letter. The man that wrote the letter mentions that his wife, the main characters Aunt, would be arriving at the train station in Boston the next day which means this story will probably be told by the nephew about the Aunts stay in Boston.
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The recollection of his Aunt makes him question his existence, and makes him ill. Shows that the Aunt has had and will have a big impact on him.
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Setting is revloved around the whole story because it shows theme and how the story developes. This builds the story and and helps make the story intresting while it can also show where or how people are.
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The metaphorical comparison of just hearing his Aunt Georgiana’s name and a huge drop below her feet appearing is great imagery that comes from her point of view. As we are able to experience this fear that this name induces. Bring meaning to this character who we haven’t even met yet and connects the reader through the authors point of view.
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The way he acts right after he hears his aunt’s name tells us about how he feels about Aunt Georgiana’s existence and why does it make him feel the certain way that it does. The story is told from the first-person point of view while putting readers in his perspective.
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This is told in first person thought the eyes of a man. Information is given to us by this man reciting old memories, in this case to give us context to him and his Aunt’s relationship. This effect builds more suspense, as we are building up to him meeting his Aunt with him. It conveys more of the main characters emotions and makes us emphasize more with him as well.
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Point of view shows a perspective of what the character sees or does. This is important because it connects to theme and and you can usually put the pieces together on how the person reacts or feels towards something.
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This sentence gives us context to his relationship with his aunt and he is clearly being thrown back into negative memories of living on the farm. He says, “I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as they were raw again.” This is obviously a negative memory and we can see that his aunt’s presence, or even name, brings up traumatic memories. This creates a suspenseful feeling for the reader because they know will want to know why he is so traumatized by his aunt.
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the locations of a station and a train both intend on you going from one place to another, from what we know the narrator (Clark) will be inheriting a small legacy so the theme of this could symbolically be the start of one legacy going on to the next.
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THe location of the train station is usually filled with smoke and coal and a lot of confusion. We know from later on in this paragraph that His aunt is covered in soot and that its obvious she works a lot. thus adding to my theme about hard work and perseverance and how the train station with its smoke and dirtiness shows us how these people are not afraid to work hard.
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This metaphor helps us understand how he views his aunt after not seeing her for a long time. The way he is describing his aunt shows that she is a hardworking woman and that she has gone through a lot in the past.
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This sentence gives us a point of view on how Clark views his relationship with his aunt and how he sees her, he sees her with respect and awe as she has the same type of will and attitude he would compare similarly to an explorer.
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the village is in the mountains for generations shows a theme of persistence and legacy down through the generations of families that lived there.
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The Location is in the Mountains. Mountains are usually associated with accomplishments because you must reach the top to achieve your goals. Since we know the Theme is Hard work and persistence we can link the mountains to the hard work of the Aunt and to how long the lagacy’s have been passed down from generation to generation.
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This location of these unsettled lands in Nebraska shows us the toughness of his Aunt, and his hence why he isn’t worried when he sees the condition that she’s in, unlike Mrs. Springer. This is could demonstrate a possible theme of perseverance and hard work.
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This sentence tells us the time period and the living conditions his aunt experienced. We know that she was a Homesteader in Nebraska so we can assume that this is set in the 1860s-1880s or somewhere in that time period. We also know that she had to settle in Nebraska so we know that she is resilient and strong because she started from the group up. This help builds the theme that his aunt is strong and determined.
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This metaphor shows how clark views his Aunt. He knows the struggle that she’s been and how hard life has been on her so he acknowledges her hardships and has respect for her.
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This quote describes his aunt’s constant struggle. He says that she was constantly exposed to the harsh winds and had to drink alkaline water that warped her figure. We learned in the previous paragraph that she lived in Nebraska for 30+ years so this adds to the theme that she is resilient and strong because she had to endure these tough conditions yet never left.
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This quote relates to the theme of the story because it gives us a look into the past of the Aunt and what her life used to look like before she arrived in the city. It discusses the harsh conditions she had to live in and how that contributed to the way she looks now. This shows how strong her character is because after decades of having to live in these harsh environments, she still seems to be a strong person.
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Why this sentence shows location to theme is because of the aunt and basically its setting by which it shows that she is working on the farm and shows point of view from the aunt as she’s hard working and pushes her nephew to do better on the farm.
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This sentence helps to establish the point of view in this story. It shows his history with her and how he feels bad for thinking any lesser of her. It also shows just how much and how little has changed between them in this time. These changes then become relevant again later as he wonders whether or not she regrets leaving.
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This location of this jam packed farm house furthers my hypothesis of one of the main central themes involving an emphasis of hard work and perserverance. This sentence points out how the Aunt works extremely hard to keep the farm going, and still pushes her Nephew to stay up late learning a new language. It is obvious she is a very hard working and dedicated person, and she wants the same for her Nephew.
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I really think that this location is a perfect example of showing Aunt Georgina’s strength and how hard she worked for what she had. Georgina was responsible for so much around the farm including cooking all of the meals, taking care of the 6 children, and teaching the children. This shows how strong and caring Georgina’s character was and how independent she had to be in order to survive and succeed on the farm.
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This location shows us quite a bit about development of Clark in his child and how that contributes to the overall theme of the story. The first important thing is how the Aunt contributed to Clark’s education. She was the one that taught him Latin, Shakespeare, and music. Without her and the farm they lived on, Clark wouldn’t be the person he was.
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In this sentence, we can already see the theme. The boy in the story is learning from his Aunt Georgina from something that her husband bought 15 years ago when she had little to no experience with instruments. This shows us how she had lived her life in her past. Furthermore, it explains that she is interested in music and is a religious person. This explains everything we need to know about aunt Georgina that she is not just hardworking but a very cultivated woman. She is very open-minded because she is willing to learn new things like music and at the same time carry on with her religious life.
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Clark calling her a pious woman shows the respect he has for her faith and for her as a person. It adds to the feelings we already know he has for her and adds to the respect we already know he has for her from the earlier paragraphs
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We can see theme already by the story telling us the setting and also the point of view of the girl with nightmares. This gives us the location to theme because it gives us both important parts of theme.
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We see the bringing up of the train station again which shows the grit of the Aunt but we also see that she was in a lot of discomfort but dont hear her complain about it. This shows us how strong the aunt it and how she can deal with discomfort since she usually gets things on her own or knows how to get things done on her own.
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Shows location by telling us where the Boston Symphony Orchestra and actually enjoys the performance which shows a characters point of view because it’s happiness. This is important because it expresses everybody more feeling.
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Here, we can see that she is in this big beautiful city that she grew up in, that has tons of fun stuff for them to do, especially in contrast to her farm back in Nebraska. However, all she can think about is how she didn’t leave proper instruction on how to feed one of the farm animals. This again shows how much of a hard worker she is, further pushing the theme of hard work and perseverance.
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the location of them being in a concert hall could connect a theme of life and how one chooses to live it, we see this in this sentence as aunt Georgiana feels the details of the musician’s music “go into her soul” possibly reminder her of the times when she used to be deeply fond of music and almost like a different person when she was back then, evidence from when Clark talks about his boyhood memories of his aunt.
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This metaphor helps to build point of view by showing the main character’s sudden realization. He had not thought about the real effect this would have on his aunt. So, when it happens, his surprise is shown through the metaphor. It also helps to give a bit of his perspective on the plains his aunt comes from, referring to them as “inconceivably silent”.
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This sentence further explains and supports the idea of Georgiana being religious. It tells us a little bit about her past and how her interests in music started and why is it so important to her besides working in the prairie. Also in the first sentence of paragraph 13, it is being mentioned that seeing the musicians was the only thing that interested her which seems like she gives more priority to the things that matter to her which supports the main point that is her hardship.
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this metaphor gives us a point of view into how Clark thinks about his aunt’s physical appearance as he references that her hands look like they’ve been “pulled stretched into mere tentacles to hold, and lift, and knead with”. all damage is done to aunt Georgiana with her time on the prairie. physical damage Clark might not have a high opinion on, as throughout the story Clark would bring up his aunt’s physical appearance in a demining tone implying
that although Clark seems to respect his aunt and seems to care about her. his opinion of her physical appearance is low
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Her emotions right after she hears the song shows how much she appreciates little things in life that are so important to her. The reason behind this could be that her life in the prairie is stopping her from taking a break and enjoying little things like this which makes her excited and happy. And now that she is enjoying the music which is something she absolutely adores, it is making her emotional.
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In this paragraph, Clark has taken his Aunt, Georgina to a concert after she had spent many years away from Boston. Throughout the section, there is a theme of how her soul seems to awaken again. Clark compares her soul to a strange moss that was placed on a dusty shelf, but would grow again if place in water. In this case, Georgina is the moss and being in the opera house around music is her water. This metaphor shows that Clark knows that Georgina’s soul can almost renew itself after a long time of being away from what she loved.
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In this sentence, Clark is talking about moss and how it can be left in a dusty shelf but will grow again if placed in water. This is a metaphor which compares aunt Georgiana to the moss. Clark is saying how Georgiana is growing after being placed in a opera house. This metaphor establishes Clark’s point of view as it shows what he thinks about the situation.
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I think the lack of a real ending for this story is meant to represent the struggle for women’s rights at the time it was written. Society was stuck at a crossroads of improving women’s rights and just continuing their oppression. The answer is fairly clear, it would probably be better for Georgiana to not return to her husband and it would definitely be better for women to have more rights. However, by the end of the story, the actual decision has not been made yet, just as it hadn’t in real life.
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Read “A Wagner Matinée” and make 5 comments:
Locate one metaphor within “A Wagner Matinée” and base a comment on it: How does that metaphor create point of view in the story?
Base one comment a sentence that demonstrates the point of view in “A Wagner Matinée” (Voice telling the story that controls the information)? How does that point of view create meaning in the story?
Base three comments on locations that demonstrate possible themes (topic + judgement) for “A Wagner Matinée”.
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