This story
by , published in The New Yorker in 1978, consists mainly of afrom mother
to daughter (presumably), though the daughter does respond twice to her mother's litany of
admonitions.
The admonitions are a stream of consciousness of what to do and
what not to do; the overall lack of organization of the thoughts and the unnecessarily rough
language do add elements of humor. The mother clearly wants her daughter to both acquire life
skills that a woman needs to navigate the world successfully and maintain a reputation as a
proper woman; this is humorously obvious when she intersperses her instructions with multiple
warnings to avoid being "the slut I have warned you against becoming." There are
gentler ways to make the...
No comments:
Post a Comment