The Role Of Women In Crossroads: A Sad Vaudeville '

In Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, a woman fakes her death in order to leave her husband. She does this because she blames him for making her play a part for him in their marriage, and she wants him to pay. She feels as though, ever since she 's known him, she has been pretending to be the woman he wants instead of the person she is. While no such drastic measures are taken in “Crossroads: A Sad Vaudeville”, the woman does something very similar- she puts out a picture of herself that she has altered, because she thinks that is what the men she is looking for want to see. Both of these women, then, misrepresented themselves in the hopes of finding love; however, fundamental differences in their personalities and lives created very different outcomes …show more content…
Both women eventually reach a point where they stop being able to pretend that they are something they 're not. For the old woman, this point is when she throws away the flower in the train station. She has made the decision that she will not pretend to be a young woman any longer. This is further proven when she reveals her face, showing the man that she is an old woman. For Amy, she stops being able to live with the role she is in when she starts planning to escape from it. This process takes Amy much longer than the old woman. She plans her escape for months before executing it, making sure that there is no way that she can be dragged back into a life she has come to detest. For the old woman, it is a sorrowful moment, while for Amy it is freeing. The old woman wants to embrace the role she is playing, while Amy wants to escape from it. The old woman 's yearning to be accepted as a young woman would be is apparent in her comment to the young man that “Perhaps she 's afraid to reveal herself...maybe she 's waiting to for you to discover her.”. (Solorzano, 62). Here, the old woman reveals her desire to be young, or at least be treated like she is young. She wishes that the young man would recognize her and be happy to have found her, as he would be is she had truly been the young woman in the picture. Amy 's relief is immediately …show more content…
The men respond in different ways to who the women really are. At first, neither of these men are willing to accept that the woman they think they know is just a facade. In “Crossroads”, the young man never accepts that the woman behind the veil is the same woman that he 's looking for. The old woman reveals herself to the man, and he rejects her. When she shows him her true face he leaps back, frightened, because he was expecting a young woman. He thinks, for just a moment, that she may still be the woman he is looking for, but in the end he can 't see past her age. He voices these thoughts, saying, “It 's ridiculous! I thought you were she!” (Solorzano, 65). Meanwhile, Nick believed for years that his wife was a certain kind of woman with certain characteristics, and he really loved her. After she leaves, he begins to suspect that she has orchestrated her disappearance. He begins to investigate, and soon unravels the elaborate guise that Amy had been displaying ever since he 's known her. As he learns more about Amy 's true self, her begins to despise her- both for deceiving him for so long and for so neatly removing herself from the life he thought they both had wanted. He is eventually forced to reunite with Amy, and instead of rejecting her as the man in Crossroads does the old woman, he moves from total loathing of her to a reluctant respect for the 'new ' Amy. Eventually, he