Monday, September 22, 2008
Who throws a cat?
after i read "Mothers Day" i was really confused and almost upset. i simply do not understand why she through the cat. i mean the story in general seemed sort of random to me. i get that mothers day is coming up and she gets sick so she cant go and buy her mother a present in time to give it to her on mothers day but what are we the audience supposed to take from this story? she is going through puberty and i know that is probably tough on her but that does not leave us with very much to reflect on. what i like about most of the stories that we have read in class thus far is that they take us places where most of us have never been before. "Mothers Day" takes us nowhere extraordinary and that is what i do not like very much about it. on top of all of what i dont like about this book already is the incident with the cat. now i do have a cat but that is not the reason i dont like what happened to it. i thought about how the cat fits into the story for quiet a while after reading this story and could not come up with a definate answer. today in class i even brought the subject up and im not sure we really defined the cat incident then so i remain confused. does anybody have a thought on this?
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3 comments:
In Gloria Sawai’s short story “Mother’s Day” the protagonist, the little girl, lives her life according to what she has been told. She constantly refers to things that she has been taught when she defends her views. She thinks, ““Judge not, lest you be judged”, the Scripture says” (199) or “As the Catechism says: “Let husbands and wives love and respect each other”” (200). As the story unfolds, it seems as if the girl feels she is powerless to alter the direction of her life. She could not even speak out against her father when he saw her naked chest. She thinks, “I couldn’t say anything. I just lay there and cried” (202). As she is physically getting older, the girl is afraid of having to become a mother one day. She feels as if society is pushing her towards motherhood. Her neighbor even tells her, “You’re going to make a very good little mother” (204). Therefore, she believes that motherhood is inevitable. The girl may have killed the cat because the cat represents herself and her belief in her inability to decide her own fate. Before she kills the cat she thinks, “But most of all, I hated it dangling there alone, under the stars, watching me, waiting” (205). As the cat’s fate is in her hands, the little girls feels that her own fate is in society’s hands. Her act of killing the car can be seen as her disproval of people pushing her towards the idea of motherhood. She seems frustrated at the fact that there is even a day named Mother’s Day. She believes that society makes it seem as if all women must become mothers. Her act of killing the cat may represent her disproval of this societal view.
Has it occurred to anyone that she mentions the Japanese Boy/Girl Day festival, yet doesn't react in an apeshit way? Maybe she still identifies herself as a kid, although she'd like us to think she's all grown up.
To add on what Pat said, the narrator of the story is trying to deny growing up, and having people depending on her, which can explain why she killed the cat since it was depending on her.
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