Neal Post 2 AP Lit
I am supposed to respond to something that we read or discussed in the class. Considering that we only read one story, I guess I will be talking about the Birthmark. What I found amusing in this story was the gender stereotypes. Both the women and the man did exactly what you thought they would do. The women was weak, unable to convince her husband of anything. The man was a awful, awful person, telling his wife how to make herself perfect. Lets start the with the man.
The man is a terrible husband. He is a controlling mentally abusing person. He physiologically forces his wife to hate herself. His wife starts off being happy with who she was, until this man changes her. He does it upfront by telling her that he could remove it, at first she did not quite understand what he was getting at. then he hits her with the verbal punch of telling her she was so close to being perfect but the birthmark ruined her. This is exactly how a lot men are portrayed, as the stronger, but a lot meaner, person in a relationship. When his disgust at her causes her to faint, he realizes that he has hurt her, then goes through the abusive husband phase of regret, and pampers her. although, when he finds his wife spying on him, he goes back to being abusive and starts to yell at her. this is just like how abusive people will always be abusive and can't change. At the end of the story when the wife dies, the husband is happy that he got rid of the birthmark.Now lets move onto the wife.
The wife is the perfect example of the weak women in a relationship. She just lets her husband push her around mentally. at the begging of the story, when her husband tells her that she is not perfect, she just accepts it as a fact. she is not a strong independent women, but is instead, completely dependent on what her husband thinks. even after she realized that her husband couldn't stand to look at her, she did not leave him, she tried to change her self physically to please him. she wanted to make him happy so hard that she went as far as to risk her life, drinking a potion that she knew could kill her. when she woke up from her nap and knew that she was dying, she was not mad at her husband, but happy because he had cured her of the birthmark.
Altogether the story does a good job of exemplifying the roles of women and men in relationships. the man is abusive, controlling, and strong arms his wife into doing things that at first she did not want to do. The wife is weak, emotionally dependent, and dies to make her man happy. she is who i would tell my daughter (I really hope i don't have a daughter) to not be.