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Friday, May 17, 2019

Analysis of Guy de Maupassant’s “Old Mother Savage” Essay

We argon all taught that our identity lies in the roles we play throughout life, in other words, in our actions. William Shakespeare wrote, All the worlds a stage / And all the men and women merely players. / They watch their exits and their entrances (As You like It, II, vii). Whenever people act outside of their parts whenever we miss our entrance, our identity is challenged. This can be seen e reallyday in all walks of life and in all arenas. For example, a teen father who takes responsibility for his child is behavior upon with surprised admiration while a teen mother is look up with distain for becoming big(predicate) in the first place. Placing standards and expectations upon people can be a vastly good thing, only if what happens when those standards and expectations choke too rigidto all consuming?Rigid, all-consuming, roles have been required of women since time remembered. Even in the twenty-first century, the career char is still expected to maintain a family. Glori a Steinhem puts it succinctly I have til now to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career. Men are expected to place high priorities on their careers. The implication is that a man will receive little criticism for neglecting his family for his career, while a woman will be criticized sharply for having a career without as rise up as being an excellent married woman and mother. Many of these identity feminine roles have been so inflexible that many a(prenominal) women can non break free in order to discovery the woman inside.When circumstances force them out of their traditionalistic roles, they find themselves wondering, Who am I? What is my project? Guy de Maupassant in his short story Old female parent Savage (1885) depicts a classic example of this. His main character is a mother in German occupied France who is deprived of her identity roles i.e. married woman and mother. Since she has nothing else to give her life purpose, she becomes homicidal and a turn suicidal. In this story, Maupassant is arguing that women who have uncompromising and limited identity roles can become violent to themselves and others.Maupassant paints a vivid picture of how nineteenth century countrywomen of France presented themselves to the world at large. The narrators friend,Serval, describes her as not at all timidtall and gaunt, neither given to joking nor to being joked withthe men family come in for a little fun at the inn, moreover the women are always very staid (p. 161). Victoire Simon, Old Mother Savage, is a kind, yet reclusive woman. She had once offered the Maupassant wine when he passed by her cottage fifteen years earlier tired and thirsty an obvious kindness (p. 160), yet Serval, Maupassants friend who tells the story of Old Mother Savage, implies that a staid attitude is normal for the women of the area.Maupassant presents his readers with a woman who has been taught very specific actions for conduct. She dresses so that her tigh tly boundgrey hair is never seen in public. She was taught trading and never learned how to stretch her mouth in laughter. By the time Maupassants readers meet Victoire, her identity is irrevocably tied to performing the duties of wife and mother. Just like all the other wives of the region, she is nothing without the duties of either wife and/or mother.Victoire has her identity challenged thrice. The first challenge occurres many years before when the father, an old poacher, had been shot by gendarmes police (p. 160). This provides a serious blow to her wife identity but she buries the lose because after all half(a) her identity is still intactshe is still a mother. The role of mother is more prevalent than that of wife since, she cannot control the actions and their consequences of her hubby. He, to some extent, failed in his role of husband and father by getting caught at poach and subsequently shot for the offense. Victoire, on the other hand, is still around to perform all t he motherly duties of retention a home, cooking meals, and mending clothes, which she does religiously.The second challenge to her identity comes when war is declared and her tidings, now thirty-three, goes to crusade in the Franco- Prussian War. Victoire is alone. She knows her transaction but has no one to perform it for save for herself. Her life consists of going to the hamlet once a week, to buy herself bread and a little meat whence get concealment home at once (p. 161). She does wholly what is necessary to keep herself alive until she can resume her duty as mother. In her mind there is nothing else for herno gossiping with the village ladies no sewing a new garment for herself no cups of tea with aneighbor. Her world ceases to function without her duty to her son.The closing stroke to her identity began with the arrival of the Prussians. She is required to billet quartette of the occupying German soldiers, since she was known to be well off (p. 161). These young men, about the same age as her son would clean up the kitchen, scrub up the flagstones, chop wood, peel potatoes, wash the house-linendo, in fact, all the housework, as four good sons might do for their mother (p. 161). She would cook and mend for them, as a good mother would do. She still had a purposeto be a mother even if it was to surrogate sons. For a month these soldiers are sons not enemies then she receives word that her son has been killed in the war. Suddenly, her world is shattered without her son she has lost her last shred of purpose. The gendarmes had killed the father, the Prussians had killed the sonand suffering flooded her heart (p. 162). With her husband buried for years, her son dead she has no identity and because no purpose in life. Within moments, she plans a special form of revengenot only will others suffer as she has, not only will someone die for to avenge her son, but she will be accredited to die in consequence of her actions.Suddenly, the four German son s become four German soldiersthe enemy. Simple folk dont go in for the luxuries of patriotic hatredthe low-down and lowlypay the heaviest pricetheir masses are killed off wholesale (p. 162). Ones like these German soldiers billeting in her home murdered her boy. It is quite possible that she would have assumed a German mother was condole with for her son like she was caring for the German men. She is, after all, a simple folk, who would not have much knowledge of the intricacies of war beyond the billeting of the German soldiers. Therefore, not only did German soldiers kill her son, but also a German mother failed in her duty toward her son. Through a carefully penalise plan conceived in the brief afternoon of discovering the fate of her son, Victoire kills the soldiers. She burns her cottage to the ground with the soldiers trapped inside. When the German ships officer asks her how the fire started, she said, I lighted it, myself. She tooktwo papers from her pocket.Thats about V ictors her son death. Thats their names, so that you can write to their homes. Tell them the German mothers how it happened, and tell them it was I whodid it, Victoire Simon, that they call the Savage. gaint forget. In order to ease her grief, she wanted other mothers to suffer as much as she was suffering. She knew she would be shot for her actions she was probably counting on it. She could easily have lied. She could have told the German Officer just about any excuse, but she didnt. What did she have to live for? She had no purpose for living without her husband and son. Her society, by placing limited and ridged identity roles on its women, robbed her of the ability to discover an identity within herself develop from family. Therefore, she did the only thing she could dotake revenge on the closest target and be sure she did not survive the experience.Maupassant, in five short pages, presents a compelling argument for the avoidance of limiting women with restrictive identity ro les. Disastrous consequences are all too likely to result from their removal. Consequences that go beyond the death of four soldiers and their murder, the narrators friend Serval had his chateau burned down by the Prussians imputable to Victoires actions. If her identity had been broaderif she knew herself outside of societal-imposed roles, she then may have had something to cling toa purpose in life rather than a kamikaze plan of revenge.

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