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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The metaphor creates a new point of view too look at Aunt Georgina. This is someone who has been around since the narrator was very young, and is very important.
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This is sort of highlighting her to a gangling farmer-boy. Because of how she saw similarities to how she looked compared to that farmer boy. “my hands cracked and raw from the corn husking”. This sort of creates a point of view from the seemingly main character who made her aunt out as judgemental.
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The similarities to a “gangling farmer-boy” that she noticed of him were his hands being cracked and raw from husking.
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The point of view of the narrator is diffing from that of the other character (the land lord). Because we have been with the narrator since the beginning of the story, I am inclined to believe that I too should have immense respect for the aunt as opposed to anything else.
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This location represents the contrast between the frontier and the city where Clark is – it ties into the theme of inner self and connection with inner self. Earlier in the paragraph, Georgiana is described as having been a music teacher and later in the story we are given Clark’s memories of music with her. However, this frontier life described in the end of the paragraph does not mention music anywhere, and this is representative of struggle. During this time, Georgiana was not able to connect with the part of herself that loved music, but it still existed within her. It was so clearly within her that it came right out when Clark took her to a concert later in the story.
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This location is her home well her new home at least when she was younger she lived in the city probably getting to experience things like the orchestra and enjoy life but, since she moved to her new home it has been one hardship after another her dreams have been buried down below and not just her dreams also her memories. It is not as if she had a choice if she didn’t do her work her husband and nephews would struggle there was no time to stop and think so because of this she has no dreams. Leaving her home the place that only ever brought her hard times gave her a chance to remember everything she wished for and no only that but everything she had. By getting this chance she didn’t want to go back to the countless hours of work and the only way to not go back was to not leave the orchestra was where everything resurfaced so once she left she assumed everything was over.
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Although at the beginning of the story Clark was judging Aunt Georgina appearance, mainly because they both live their lives differently. We can see in this sentence the gratitude Clark has towards Aunt Georgina. He is really thankful for the time they had spent and that she was the one who taught him everything that he knows about music. And on that note we can also see that music is the one thing that connects Aunt Georgina and Clark and it brings them closer together.
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There were quite a few sentences that demonstrated the point of view. Especially ones that constantly went through the story as if we were currently looking through the main character’s perspective. Although one that more stands out to me is this sentence. The main character is recalling the story herself as if she was there. This is why I think the point of view is first person.
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So far, a theme of the story has been hardship. Here we see why the narrator respects his aunt so and it is through that hardship at her farmhouse. He connects the locations to his reasons for respect.
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The point of view we see here is his view of his aunt and all the work she goes through, cooking 3 meals for 6 farm-hands, and putting 6 children to bed. The meaning of telling this is most likely a showing of how hard working his aunt is and how much she needs to do everyday
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It’s the place where he and his aunt worked a lot with little break, I do thing this whole setting is vastly related to work and struggle because that is what they do there all the time
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When Aunt Georgina told Clark “Don’t love it so well, or it may be taken from you”. Shows that she’s had experience with something that she loved so much but it was taken from her. It was like she was kind of warning Clark because she’s had experience with loss. And that just shows the loss of music has impacted Aunt Georgina’s life and that it may be has been blocking her from true happiness.
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This is a quote from one of Clark’s memories from his childhood home with Georgiana. This is foreshadowing for the fact that Georgiana ends up sacrificing the music that she seems to love when she goes to live on the frontier. This fits in with my idea for theme being “connecting with one’s inner self” because it offers insight into the fact that the music means a lot to Georgiana, and it makes you feel sad for her giving it up. Her reconnection to music occurs later in the story when she goes to the concert.
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Even though Georgiana grew up in the city she seems to not get a solid grip on her surroundings until she goes to the concert hall. However, at the concert hall, there is still a sense of estrangement because she sacrificed the sense of belonging somewhere when she left her life in the city behind. This reminds her of everything she had once had and how she is now so far from those things. This all establishes the idea that “home” is a place of comfort and leaving it can make you feel out of place.
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The place that I’m highlighting is the city where her aunt had lived during her youth. She had also wanted to go there for a long time, but now that she’s there she seemed to have not noticed. Throughout the story, we seem to go through flashbacks of her with her aunt when they both were younger. Then when we get back from the flashback we seem to revisit the place of memory. This gives me the idea of the topic being something like reminiscing life. Or something similar to that extent.
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It has been one thing after another she has had NO time to dwell on the past giving her no recollection of everything she once had and everything she lost. The city was a place of hope and dreams but, once she left the city her dreams seems to slowly float away until they were completely lost merely a grain of sand in the desert. She might even bury those memories to help deal with the pain of her newfound life. But, the orchestra was too powerful and brought all of the memories flooding back in one brushstroke. While she was in the orchestra the city was no longer lost her dreams were no longer lost it seemed like she had a chance to get it all back.
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This is another piece of evidence that seems to fit my idea of the topic discussed previously. This is because she plans on taking her aunt to the Boston Orchestra because it reminds her aunt of her love of various things in her youth.
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This is a good sentence for theme, as it demonstrates how they desperately want to repay their aunt, but cannot. Perhaps a good theme for that would be attempting to overcome a struggle?
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Continuing on the there of hardship, the orchestra seems to be some sort of reward for the aunt years of hard times. The story has just mentioned how she didn’t remember that in this town she had half a lifetime of hardship, and maybe it is because this is a totally new experience for her. She did say too that she had not been to one of these concerts.
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The concert is basically a break from all of her hard work, it’s a place for her to escape to
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The story, being in first person POV from Clark’s perspective, is revealing layers of Georgiana’s character and experiences. This statement by Clark shows his acknowledgement of those layers and how he had tried to “judge a book by its cover.” His perspective shows that he is learning and realizing more about her at almost the same rate that the audience is.
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This metaphor shows how the narrator is speaking in first person, about how their aunt regards other women.
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This comment is a metaphor for how Georgiana sees other women, as Braeden mentioned before me. She regards them as “daubs of paint on a palette,” which implies that there were many women, none of which were super outstanding and they almost seemed to flow or mix together, like paint on a palette does. I’m picturing a drab palette with tons of like colors mixed together, and to me this metaphor means that the aunt had an aversion to “city” women, since she had been hardened by the frontier.
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This sentencing shows that the concert really woke her up. It woke up her spirit and soul, because in the beginning of the story we could barely see Aunt Georgina emotions. But the concert helped with that, it opened up something in her heart that had been shut down for a long time. This point of view creates meaning to the story because at the beginning of the story Aunt Georgina barely seemed interested about music, she barely spoke of it. It was like she wanted nothing to do with music, but concert broke that silence.
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Here could be another theme, triumph. This woman has forgotten about this life for so long, and the narrator finally broke her out of her shell. She is completely in awe and shock of what she has been missing, and is clearly very eager to get back to it, whether she knew it or not.
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So, this again shows first person POV. However, this sentence is particularly good at also adding the meaning for why it’s first person. This person clearly loves their aunt, they recount many fond memories of her, and for almost all of her trip to Boston, they attempt to repay some of the joy she brought them as a child. Being in first person allows this unique perspective, as well as a deep personal meaning with it. It might also inspire others subconsciously to put themselves and role models in their lives in the position of these two.
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This sentence shows first-person point of view. This sentence shows the bond between the narrator and their aunt. It demonstrates how their aunt took on a motherly role and truly cared. This creates a deeper meaning because the reader can better understand how her past life contrasts with her current life. This point of view forms a more personal connection between the reader and the characters which creates a sense of being there and really knowing the characters.
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As they’re listening to the music of the orchestra that ties deeply to her aunt’s youth. As well as her musical past, she doesn’t seem to give any visible facial signs that make her respond to it. She wonders what goes through her head. This sort of still gives me a reminiscing topic, but it sort of makes me feel it’s a little different. More so of remembrance of her past from a different perspective.
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The author uses the word I here stating that it is first-person and he is in the body of the aunt Geworgianas nephew. This point of view makes it much easier to understand the aunt and her feelings because the nephew grew up with her and knows much of her past and present and can help us understand the emotion she is feeling and why she is feeling this way. Without the nephew’s point of view, it would be much more difficult to depict the meaning in this story.
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The narrator compares aunt Georgina’s poor old hands to mere tentacles to hold, and lift, and knead with shows that Clark kind of feels sorry for her. The way that Aunt Georgina has been living her life is different than Clark’s, so we can see why Clark was judging her physical appearance because it’s not something that he is used to.
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The narrator in this part of the text compares the human soul to moss. At the concert, Georgiana’s soul is revived even though it had been dormant for a long period of time. This is similar to how once you place moss back in water it will grow again. This means that your soul can come back alive when you’re placed in the right situation/place. This creates point of view because it places an emphasis on how Clark was able to bring part of his aunt back by reminding her of her history with music. This reiterates the connection between Clark and Georgiana because this was sort of a bonding experience similar to the ones in Clark’s childhood.
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As the music plays Georgina becomes emotional and is likely thinking about how she left all of this behind. This brings up a lot of emotions because deep down she still has a longing for music. The music had an effect on her brain that caused the part of her she lost to awaken. This creates the idea that music is very powerful because of the emotions it can trigger.
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I think that one of the themes of this piece has to do with one’s inner self and being able to connect with it, regardless of what struggles you go through. Georgiana is a woman who has experienced a frontier life and Clark notes that she seems changed by this experience, but also has memories of her and music. When she returns from the frontier, she is still the same Georgiana she was in his memories. When she hears the music at the concert, she is reconnected with that part of her.
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This is my final idea for a good theme, and that is perseverance. Their aunt has spent most of her life away, and presumably would have lost interest in or forgotten her old passions entirely. But music in this instance holds strong, and even a quarte of a century later, she remembers music and her deep emotional connection reflares, or as you might say, it persevered that entire time.
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The moss is a metaphor for his aunt’s soul. Over time all fo the things she has had to do and all the dreams she didn’t get to follow that was the moss slowly dying but, going to that orchestra was the equivalent of watering the moss in a sense it brought her back to life. The same way the water brought the moss back to life rather than just surviving. The metaphor helps you see her side of the story and that she isn’t living just merely surviving.
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Aunt Georgina has had music in her life for a long time. She was even a music teacher before she dropped everything and moved with her husband. The concert was a waking point for Aunt Georgina, it was a sudden realization of everything Aunt Georgina had lost. Even the question itself had shown that Aunt Georgina had been missing something in her life.
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One location was the concert. It seems that the concert was not something for her to relax and enjoy but more of a breaking point after everything she has gone to she finally sees what she could be doing. What she should be doing. What she deserves. But, she knows once she leaves the concert hall everything she experienced everything she wants will be gone and lost forever. In a moment of panic, she decides not leaving is the only way to stay within this dream of hers the perfect life. Her perfect life.
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The concert awakens a part of Georgiana that had seemed to be lost. Music made her think about her life before as a music teacher and how she enjoyed living that life. Once she moved away she had to leave that behind so it was no longer a major part of her identity. Music was no longer what her life revolved around so that part of her seemed to disappear. However, at the concert, the reader is shown that you never really lose yourself or the things that make you, you. Even if you are not in the place that makes you who you are that doesn’t make it less of your identity.
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After a break from the hardship at the concert, the aunt is now going home. Home is the reminder of the hardship. It is where she went so much time working and likely knows she will die there. The concert was her escape and now she know she has to go back.
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Home is where she has to work all the time, its representation is stress, hardship, work, and effort. She had her fun, but needs to go back and do her needs
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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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