Family stories are gifts that get preserved through time and get passed on from one generation to another. They are memorable stories of the past that help shape the future of the family. In “Family Stories”, Steven Zeitlin, Amy Kotkin, and Holly Cutting Baker state that “by combining fact and fiction expressively a family can shape its own history” (10). They highlight the fact that family stories get altered and embellished based on the narrator and the audience. The narrator can hide some parts of a story, focus on others, or even play around the events to send a specific message to the people listening. Dorothy Canfield, in the short story “Sex Education” depicts a niece’s story of her Aunt Minnie telling her and her friends about an incident
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In the rising action, Canfield introduces Aunt Minnie’s son’s girl problems. The narrator talks about how Aunt Minnie’s son, Jake, runs away with a young woman and Aunt Minnie helps him out herself by finding a “suitable” girl for him. She matures when she talks and helps her son because at that point it was important for her to connect with him and be open about all subjects, especially sex and women. With Jake’s actions “she certainly could not have remained ignorant, after seeing over and over what she probably had; after talking with Jake about the things which, a good many times, must have come up with desperate openness between them” (787). The transforming society and culture allowed Aunt Minnie not only to be open with Jake, but also to be open with her friends. All of that making her more of a loving mother and friend. After years of cultural change and personal troubles and dilemmas, Aunt Minnie is comfortable enough to reflect on the night in the cornfield and feel bad about the possibility of hurting Cousin Malcolm. She believes she overreacted because she did not know better at the time. She now understands that women are not so different from men when it comes to sexual desires. The resolution of the story is her feeling bad about what had happened and …show more content…
The message of Aunt Minnie’s story reshapes itself throughout “Sex Education” showing how understanding what a person’s sexuality is helps in grasping many different aspects of life. Being able to express sexuality changes a person’s beliefs. As it is proposed in “Family Stories” by Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker, “family stories are usually based on real incidents which become embellished over the years” (10). Aunt Minnie does not change the story, but her perspective on what has happened changes a lot. She blames herself in the end for possibly hurting Cousin Malcolm who did not harm her. During the time of the incident, in her young scared mind she saw it as some type of sexual assault even though it was not. She was intimidated by what Cousin Elle painted in her mind. She tells her third version of the story because silencing women sexuality is the way many people indoctrinated women into the service of men and she wanted to stop that. Educating young women about sex gives them insight to the changing perception of reality. Dorothy Canfield expresses the power of the dominant story in woman’s resistance through Aunt Minnie’s three versions of the story and by that, she educates her
In the rising action, Canfield introduces Aunt Minnie’s son’s girl problems. The narrator talks about how Aunt Minnie’s son, Jake, runs away with a young woman and Aunt Minnie helps him out herself by finding a “suitable” girl for him. She matures when she talks and helps her son because at that point it was important for her to connect with him and be open about all subjects, especially sex and women. With Jake’s actions “she certainly could not have remained ignorant, after seeing over and over what she probably had; after talking with Jake about the things which, a good many times, must have come up with desperate openness between them” (787). The transforming society and culture allowed Aunt Minnie not only to be open with Jake, but also to be open with her friends. All of that making her more of a loving mother and friend. After years of cultural change and personal troubles and dilemmas, Aunt Minnie is comfortable enough to reflect on the night in the cornfield and feel bad about the possibility of hurting Cousin Malcolm. She believes she overreacted because she did not know better at the time. She now understands that women are not so different from men when it comes to sexual desires. The resolution of the story is her feeling bad about what had happened and …show more content…
The message of Aunt Minnie’s story reshapes itself throughout “Sex Education” showing how understanding what a person’s sexuality is helps in grasping many different aspects of life. Being able to express sexuality changes a person’s beliefs. As it is proposed in “Family Stories” by Zeitlin, Kotkin, and Baker, “family stories are usually based on real incidents which become embellished over the years” (10). Aunt Minnie does not change the story, but her perspective on what has happened changes a lot. She blames herself in the end for possibly hurting Cousin Malcolm who did not harm her. During the time of the incident, in her young scared mind she saw it as some type of sexual assault even though it was not. She was intimidated by what Cousin Elle painted in her mind. She tells her third version of the story because silencing women sexuality is the way many people indoctrinated women into the service of men and she wanted to stop that. Educating young women about sex gives them insight to the changing perception of reality. Dorothy Canfield expresses the power of the dominant story in woman’s resistance through Aunt Minnie’s three versions of the story and by that, she educates her