Through reading “The Woman Upstairs”, Claire Messud creates the character of Nora Eldridge, an angry, self-aware narrator, who works to educate the reader on the choices and confines of being a woman and over all the female experience that is focused on a particular life stage. In my opinion, it would be difficult to write an accurate female experience without divulging into perceivable sexist stereotypes that are predominant in the culture today. Expanding on that, can we read Claire Messud’s work as a feminist, on the basis that she defies these stereotypical norms, or is she just another angry woman whose life has become a stalemate. Readers may consider her a feminist in the aspect that she rejects stereotypical norms of setting down fast
