Throughout history, women have in general been subservient to men. This still holds true today in some parts of the world, not to mention the rest of the world it was this way until quite recently. In the mid-1800s, women started to speak out against these conventional roles, often times in the form of literature. This became a large part of the realism period of literature in America. The realism period was rife with stories symbolizing women's oppression as well as their dissent for traditional roles. The short stories "A Wagner Matinee" and "The Revolt of Mother" embody this style of literature perfectly with their frequent use of powerful imagery to detail the hard lives of women and their roles in the mid-1800s.
To better analyze…show more content… The imagery of the hunched back and gray hair, help to manifest the conditions that real women from this time were put up against. Women from this time period that belonged to wealth were not the subjects of hard labor. As a result of this they did not garner the battle scars of hard working women. The women in these two stories however were extremely hard workers. The impoverished women of this time quite often ended up with gnarled hands, a stooped posture, wrinkled skin. Both women worked on farms in these stories, for Aunt Georgiana in A Wagner Matinee is was “Poor hands! They had been stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead with” (Cather 494). Sarah Penn in The Revolt of Mother was blighted to be “a small woman, gray haired” (Freeman 75). Both of these women spent over forty years of their lives on a farm. They took care of their houses and kept them in working order while their husbands worked the farm. They have worked and worked for the majority of their lives and have not complained about it once “I ain’t never complained, and I ain’t goin’ to complain now” (Freeman 78). This was very common in the mid-1800s. The compelling imagery that brings the reader right next to the gnarled women of these stories drives home just how hard they worked and how they were seen as subservient to their…show more content… Although there is a lot about them, the imagery surrounding the rest of the plot helps to evoke in the readers mind a picture of exactly is going on. If the author can paint a picture in the readers mind of what is going on in the story then it can vastly help to engross the reader and make the story more relatable. The imagery in both The Revolt of Mother and A Wagner Matinee take leaps and bounds to show the reader what it was truly like for women living in the mid-1800s. The band in the theater in A Wagner Matinee is described in so much detail that one can almost imagine sitting in on the performance. ”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 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” (Cather 492-493). This is one small example of how Willa Cather makes her story of Aunt Georgiana and Clark come alive in the readers’ minds. In The Revolt of Mother Sarah Penn goes on a tirade against her husband about her family’s living condition. The descriptions that the author provides the readers with are staggering. ”there ain’t no carpet on the floor … the paper is all dirty and droppin’ off the walls … a tiny bedroom, only large enough for a bed and a dresser … A narrow, crooked flight of stairs”
