Essay based on ”My Mother and her Sister”

Essay (700-900 words)
Short story by Jane Rogers., “My Mother and her Sister”., 2006.

A
Who knows what happiness is? Is it love? Is it money? Or is the idea of happiness in a person truly just an act…? We don’t know. We can only figure it out by trying different boundaries in our lives. A lot of people have trouble with love and finding out, what they want in life and what love is. If love was the answer to happiness, we all had a perfect goal. In “My Mother and her Sister” we are introduced to the protagonist and the protagonist’s aunt Lucy. These two people are similar to this situation. Lucy knows that there is no such thing as happiness, because she has already tried that road called love. The narrator doesn’t know what she wants and she definitely has no idea of what true happiness is or if it even exists?

The story is about the protagonist, who has her 75-years-old aunt Lucy staying for some time, after they had attended the protagonist’s mother – Lucy’s sister’s funeral. During her stay aunt Lucy tells the protagonist some perspectives of life as a woman. Through aunt Lucy, Jane Rogers creates a pessimistic view on love, happiness and the role of being a housewife.

In the beginning of the short story, the protagonist explains how she remembers her and her brother, Tim’s, school holidays at her aunt Lucy and uncle Bill’s house. She remembers how she saw her aunt Lucy as an “easy, chatty woman, good at small talk and making you feel at home” but now, after spending time with her, she is the absolute opposite; “self-contained and silent, she’s composed.” It seems like aunt Lucy wasn’t showing her true self at that time, it seems like she was putting up a façade for her children, but now when she is in another home, she can show her true self.

The protagonist wants to please Lucy by cooking her the meals she had during her school holidays at aunt Lucy and uncle Bill’s house. Aunt Lucy is not impressed and barely touches her food, so the protagonist gives up and cooks what she is normally eating. This turns out to be successful, which is another indication that Lucy has been turning on a façade to make other people happy, representing a good and healthy family, but she didn’t really want to cook the meals.
The protagonist begins to see a resemblance between her mother and her aunt Lucy. Deep down aunt Lucy and her mother are alike. The only difference between them at that time was that Lucy was good at hiding the imperfections for the sake of her marriage and her image. The protagonists’ mother, Dorothy, on the other hand didn’t care about her image.

Aunt Lucy made an early decision in life, that as a woman you must settle down. Though she had experienced love, “as if I’d been reborn”, with the man at the library she knew that that feeling was only temporary. She thought, that even if it were true love with him, that feeling would eventually die.
“[…] your mother never learnt […] that you can’t have it. That the thing you want – when you get it, it’s spoiled […] The wanting – is everything.” Aunt Lucy thinks, that only the knowing that he was out there was the point of love. She is certain about the fact that if she gave in for him she would have been disappointed later: “HE would have become ordinary. Just a man. Like your mother’s.”

The whole story is centred on the pessimistic view of love, happiness and womanhood. Jane Rogers’ themes in the story can also be seen in our view of the role of women today: they are going to have to settle, if they don’t speak what’s truly on their mind. Nevertheless, if you don’t cherish what you have and keep reaching out for what is unattainable, you are eventually going to be disappointed.

B Affirmation

“If a new love carries us, past middle age, our wife will die, at her strongest and most beautiful.” Donald Hall describes through his poem ‘Affirmation’ a pessimistic sight on how life is going to turn out and how life can be an unpleasant journey with love and dying. “To grow old is to lose everything.” He initiates the poem, which contains the themes love, lost happiness and life.
The main point in his poem is that the older we grow the more we lose. On the other hand you can say that the older we get the more we know; It’s better to know what love and loss is, than never to have loved. In his last three verses he indicates, that we all lose everything at the end. But it seems that he has accepted the fact and he is going to lose love, happiness and friends in the end. So the correlation between the poem ‘Affirmation’ and the short story ‘My Mother and her Sister’ is that; yes. We are going to lose everything we have fought for and everything we have ever loved. But isn’t it better to lose all of that experience than to lose a grey boring life with no love, happiness, goals or meaning?