Colette The Hand Summary

Improved Essays
“The Hand,” by Colette is about a wife without any identification who realize that her marriage was a mistake. She find herself oppress by giving up her freedom of single life and enter to a man world. The wife who has no name finds emotions after her wedding through the description of her husband’s hand. Her honey moon lasted only two weeks and now she start to feel tired about her husband. “ Her husband’s right hand, lying beside her, quivered in turn and beneath the curve of her back.” She feels so heavy with the weight of her husband that she couldn’t get up. “It’s as if I were lying on some animal.” The adolescent wife was unable to sleep at night because of her exhilaration opens her eyes at night, “the hand, offended, reared back

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    "The wife's story" is Written by Ursula K. Le Guin, "What of this goldfish, would you wish?" written by Etgar Keret, the "Lottery" written by Shirley Jackson these stories are connected in their background is kinda the same, but their stories are about how people do not accepted the change in some things usually the writers wrote their stories in a dark way, they idea is to prove in the stories that when they are talking about changes in some parts of the stories they accepted but in some they not accepted because there scare to change or to see something new, the majority of the time are scare to accept someone that is different than the others. The wife's story is about a female wolf describing the moments that happened before that accident, it relates to the idea in a way that the wolves only accept someone of their own kind; the female describes her husband before the accident, she was saying how magnificent was her husband and how his personality and everything start to change, she was getting scared for the strange odor in her husband . She said, "what is that-those smells? All over you!" And he said, " I do not know, " real short,and made like he was sleeping.…

    • 801 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The novel Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton, chronicles the life of a mysterious crippled hermit by the name of Ethan Frome as a flashback to his star-crossed relationship from his youth. In the process of relaying this story, Wharton characterizes Frome’s constantly ill-stricken wife as a villainous dead weight to his free spirit. Wharton uses imagery and dialogue in order to paint a lucid picture of Zeena Frome as an older, nagging wife who over-extends Ethan’s patience; additionally, Zeena’s unrelenting ill health serves as a metaphor for her enduring pestilence upon her husband. Wharton’s use of imagery and descriptive language establish a relaxed, wistful atmosphere throughout the novel.…

    • 561 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ethan Frome is in the unfortunate predicament of living a life with a woman he no longer desires, or perhaps had never desired in the first place. His heart belongs to another woman, yet he has no choice but to stay with his present wife, for a multitude of reasons that include those relating to himself and those that come from the pressure to do what’s expected of him. Ethan’s inability to properly assess and express his innermost feelings, both because of his own lack of self-confidence as well as societal expectations, leaves him stuck in a loveless marriage, forcing him to choose between his wife and the woman he has feelings for. Wharton uses tone to show Ethan’s dismay about his love life.…

    • 676 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “A Rose for Emily,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” and the “Yellow Wallpaper” are stories written from a women’s point a view by women writers who were living from the 1890s through 1930. The main characters in these stories faced difficult situations that changed their lives forever. They had limited rights, suffered abandonment from lovers, and experienced loneliness. However, each of the characters faced their problems very differently.…

    • 910 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    There were many characteristics and literary elements that defined literature in the early nineteenth century, one of the most prominent being that the world of literature was dominated solely by male writers. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that women were able to leave their mark through writing during the fin de siècle era. Women contributing to the world of literature resulted in many social and cultural changes such as the disintegration of defined gender roles, the feminist movement, and the civil rights movement. Around the same time of the fin de siècle movement, the feminist and civil rights movements had also begun.…

    • 1642 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In “The Bridegroom” by Ha Jin, the struggle about family, reputation and homosexuality within the cultural norms. Ha Jin shows a good example for the Eastern people because it opens their eyes by showing them conflicts between the value of society and individual preference. Because the Eastern culture is different from the Western on society and the peoples understanding. In the Asian countries often society effects on the way people think. This short story is about a girl named Beina who was the daughter of Cheng’s dear friend who has passed away.…

    • 512 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In Raymond Carver’s short story Cathedral, he establishes an ignorant narrator, dependent on alcohol and fixated upon physical appearance. He juxtaposes the narrator to a blind man who feels emotion rather than sees it. Through indirect characterization and first person limited point of view, Carver foils the narcissistic narrator to the intuitive blind man while utilizing sight as a symbol of emotional understanding. He establishes the difference between looking and seeing to prove that sight is more than physical.…

    • 1099 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Obedience or Resistance In the story “Astronomer 's Wife”, astronomer is the father figure, the plumber acts like the mother figure, and astronomer’s wife, Mrs Ames, represents the child figure in the story. Undoubtedly, astronomer has all father figure’s traits. Although there is no direct description of him, through his wife, Mrs Ames, I can see an acrimonious husband who takes dominance over his wife and controls her under his custody. Just like story says, “the day would proceed from this, beat by beat, without reflection, like every other day” (Boyle 1).…

    • 891 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Upon hearing the news of her husband’s death, Mrs. Mallard is in a sudden grief and weeps at once. However, after she has calmed down and is alone in her room, she realizes she is now an independent woman. She sees all the spring days and summer days without her husband, and this excites her. When she acknowledges the joy, she feels possessed by it and must control herself from letting the word…

    • 771 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the story, “Cooking Lessons” by Rosario Castellanos, a Mexican poet and author, known for her articulate writings about gender oppression which influenced feminist theories, uses food images to reflect gender roles. Castellanos also uses an interior monologue to represent the fact that women have no voice and are expected to just do and know certain things as opposed to men, for example, cooking. Eloquently written, Castellanos illustrates the inner thoughts of an educated and independent woman who has to forget all she knows and enter a unknowing world where she must depend on a man and take on the traditional role of a woman; a housewife. The nameless narrator stands starring hopelessly into a kitchen not knowing what to do or where…

    • 985 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Crow in the Woods The Crow in the Woods by John Updike is unlike any other story I have read before. The author does an odd but wonderful job in describing in detail the thoughts and surroundings of an average married man. This story meets course goal number seven as it enhances the students’ understanding of the value of holistic thinking in making informed judgments and in applying values as they become increasingly conscious of what is at stake if we fail to understand the relationship between human culture and the environment.…

    • 812 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Yellow Wallpaper vs. The Story of an Hour “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are very similar with the character, being a trapped woman who craves freedom from her authoritative husband, and theme of the women finding contentment within herself to escape her husband to become a strong and independent women. In both stories the women were described to be unequal with their husbands. During the time these two short stories were written, the early 1900’s, women were seen to be fragile and weak in need of a strong authoritative husbands to protect them. However, the two women described in the stories are going through life changing events which they exhibited in their own…

    • 963 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    They go from calm and passive to wild and uninhibited and these paragraphs describing this joy that is monstrous is not only because it overwhelms her, but because she knows that she shouldn’t feel the way she does about her husband’s death—that the world of the dull reality would consider her reaction “monstrous” in itself., but her perception was able to “dismiss the suggestion as trivial” (P.11). The pressure of society is often too heavy to bear, and women and wives, in this time period, resulted in submission because their strength ran thin easily by the constant pressure. Changes in the mindset only occurred when the husband, for example, was muted, and a new bright outlook on life came in the place of conflict, dependence,…

    • 1145 Words
    • Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    {No intro yet or conclusion}Psychological criticism is a method in which reading as dictated by Freud is applied to analyse texts, as Freud argues that the main argument to this theory is that texts such as dreams present unconscious desires of the author. Ursula K. Le. Guin is best known “for inventing fantasy worlds and uncommon experiences in such a way that readers can see themselves in the stories’ reflections,” as X.J Kennedy and Dana Gioia pointed out. Le. Guin demonstrates this in “The Wife’s Story,” by arguing that animals are the human subconscious.…

    • 2159 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin shows marriage from many different points of view, and addresses many feministic concerns. Once women became married they lacked their own unique identity, and relied on their husbands for things such as financial support. And since the husbands took care of the finances women where to cook and clean and mostly responsible for the upkeep of the home. Many parts of this story are controversial, but Mrs. Mallard being excited after learning that her husband is dead is not one of them. Mrs. Mallard, was not mistreated in her marriage but she had no reason to leave so she felt trapped.…

    • 990 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays