Summary Of The Book 'Sold' By Patricia Mccormick

Women in society have always been looked down upon, and not taken seriously for centuries. The coming-of-age novella House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, proves that statement correct. The novella is about a young girl named Esperanza who moves into a house for the first time, on a street named Mango street. The house is not what she envisioned, so she makes plans in her mind to move out and get her own place, far away, but she is still very innocent. While she’s on Mango Street, Esperanza experiences series of events, that force her to mature. In House on Mango Street, the theme that females are looked down upon, taken advantage of, and the ones to blame in society are shown through literary elements such as, conflict and characterization. The gender literary theory applies to this theme. This theme is also shown throughout multiple vignettes such as “Rafaela who drinks Coconut and Papaya Juice on Tuesdays”, “The Monkey Garden” and, “Red Clowns”.

In the novel Trafficked by Kim Purcell, a woman from Moldova encounters disloyalty and experiences adultery in America. As one tries to exile the country she is held upon her will and is compelled to do wrongdoings past worker roles that puts her in danger of desperate or death. Hannah, an ordinary teen is given an offer that may change her life forever. She is going to Los Angeles to be a nanny for a Russian family and gets paid $400 a month this will help pay for her grandmother's’ eye operation, however, that fantasy headed the wrong direction. Hannah was failing to get paid, she worked sixteen hours a day cleaning, and her letters to her grandma were failing to be sent. She sleeps in a windowless garage and is not allowed to leave the house.

Nowadays, freedom is a fundamental right for each man and woman, but it is not a perfect concept. When one’s freedom is endangered, he can do unimaginable things, especially when love is at stake or can react weirdly when he acquires it. It’s exactly what Kate Chopin, a female American author during the 19th century, did when she treated about women’s conditions in the short-story Story of an Hour in 1894, where a woman falsely learns about his husband’s death. Almost 60 years later, Roald Dahl wrote Lamb To The Slaughter, set in Great Britain, where a woman kills her husband and hide the evidences cleverly. These two short stories are not only comparative on the two female protagonists and the imagery used, but also on the main themes

A number of the stories, graphic memoirs and poems we discussed in class have introduced us to women who have been trapped in some way in their lives. Henrik Ibsen’s A Dolls House (1879) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) both demonstrate women being trapped by men in a patriarchal society in the nineteenth century. However, Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where are you going, where have you been?”(1974), Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl” (1978) and Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis (2005) are about social norms and girls being sexualized at a young age in the 20th century.

In the novel, The House On Mango Street, women face numerous challenges in their lives. Women face abuse, objectification, and oppression. They are also subjects to the societal roles that hinders them from being free and successful. Cisneros utilizes metaphors to reveal the theme of society’s gender roles restricting the lives and sexuality of women.

Connie is a fifteen year old girl who is confident and proud of herself, and almost feels as if she’s invincible, until she has a rude awakening when an unwanted visitor appears at her doorstep. The stories, "Lust" by Susan Minot, "ID" by Joyce Carol Oates, and "Where are you going, Where have you been?" also by, Joyce Carol Oates, describe the female coming of age. The female sexuality of these three young girls is that they didn’t understand their own reality, but yet wanted independence. The authors get across the message by using vivid symbols.

Daniel H. Pink said, “Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes.” At times, it may seem hard to feel for a person when one does not understand their situation. Intellectual empathy is defined by one’s ability to “accurately reconstruct the viewpoints and reasoning of others and to reason from remises, assumptions, and ideas other than one’s own.” In Patricia McCormick’s novel, Sold, characters face the grave realities of human trafficking. It also depicts the choices the girls make in the brothel. Judging a situation one cannot understand is immoral. One must understand the characters first before one can understand the decisions. Lakshmi was just a thirteen year old girl sold into prostitution by her stepfather. Shilpa grew up in a brothel. Pushpa had to provide for her children. Monica wanted to help her family. Intellectual empathy changes the way a reader views the decisions of characters such as Shilpa, Monica, and Pushpa in the novel Sold.

For centuries, women have had the role of being the perfect and typical house wife; needs to stay home and watch the children, cook for husbands, tend to the laundry and chores around the house. In her short story “Girl”, Jamaica Kincaid provides a long one sentence short story about a mother giving specific instructions to her daughter but with one question towards the end, with the daughter’s mother telling her daughter if she had done all the instructions to become a so called “perfect” woman, every man would want her. Kincaid’s structuring in “Girl,” captures a demanding and commanding tone. This short story relates to feminist perspectives. The mother expects a great deal from her daughter to have a certain potential and she does not hesitate to let her daughter understand that. As a matter of fact, the story is about two pages long, made into one long sentence - almost the whole time the mother is giving her daughter directions to follow - conveys a message to the reader that the mother demands and expects great potential in her daughter. The daughter is forced to listen and learn from what her mother is telling her to do to become the perfect housewife. Throughout the story, Kincaid uses the symbols of the house and clothing, benna and food to represent the meanings of becoming a young girl to a woman and being treated like one in society. Women are portrayed to appeal to a man to become the ideal woman in society, while men can do anything they please.

       As the tale begins we immediately can sympathize with the repressive plight of the protagonist.  Her romantic imagination is obvious as she describes the "hereditary estate" (Gilman, Wallpaper 170) or the "haunted house" (170) as she would like it to be.  She tells us of her husband, John, who "scoffs" (170) at her romantic sentiments and is "practical to the extreme" (170).  However, in a time

The novel The House on Mango Street is filled to the brim with women who are unhappy and unsatisfied with their lives. Readers meet wives who are destined to spend their lives in the kitchen, mothers who waste away cleaning up after their kids, and girls who are stuck in a hole that they can’t escape. Through Sandra Cisneros’s use of literary devices such as motifs, symbolism, and imagery, we are able to learn that the women end up in these situations by conforming to femininity, and we find the theme of women are often held back by their own gender roles.

In order to properly view a story from a feminist perspective, it is important that the reader fully understands what the feminist perspective entails. “There are many feminist perspectives, and each perspective uses different approaches to analyze and interpret texts. One is that gender is “socially constructed” and another is that power is distributed unequally on the basis of sex, race, and ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, ability, sexuality, and economic class status” (South University Online, 2011, para. 1). The story “Girl” is an outline of the things young girls

These constant beatings in Maggie Johnson’s home, furniture thrown from parent to parent, and every aspect of her family life as being negative, her family situation is not an extremly healthy one. But, despite her hardships, Maggie grows up to become a beautiful young lady whose romantic hopes for a more desirable life remain untarnished.

In this novel there is a city where rats and roving gangs break down the streets, where government has broken down. Roving gangs misbehave with other people specially women, a woman, middle-aged is brought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is her responsibility to raise the child. This novel, which the author has called an attempt at autobiography, is that woman's journal a glimpse of a future only slightly more frightful than our present, and of the forces that alone can save us from total

Sula Peace and Nel Wright are two girls with different cultures, but they have something in common: the absence of a father in their lives and lack of maternal love. Sula’s father died when she was three years old, and Nel’s father is often away from home. Helene Wright is a dominant mother who enjoys “manipulating her daughter and her husband” (Morrison, 18). She teaches her daughter to obey and be polite, but the family trip to New Orleans ultimately changes Nel’s attitude and helps her find herself. Because of her new self-finding, Nel is strong enough to develop a friendship with Sula in spite of her mother’s will. On the other hand, Hannah, Sula’s mother, raises her daughter without rules and affection, enjoying the presence of married and unmarried men in her life. The lack of mother love motivates the two girls to build a strong connection and a true friendship so that “they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s” (Morrison, 83).Nel feels like “Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself” (Morrison, 95).

All characters in the novel are living in a man’s world; nevertheless, the author has tried to change this world by the help of her characters. She shows a myriad of opportunities and different paths of life that woman can take, and more importantly she does not show a perfect world, where women get everything they want, she shows a world where woman do make mistakes, but at the same time they are the ones that pay for these mistakes and correct them.