Cheever and O'Connor

While I was able to see some sort of storyline within “Good Country People,” I was, at first, completely baffled by “The Swimmer.” It is easily the strangest short story I have read in a long time. Both stories are very vague in meaning and they both have diverse characters. Structurally, it is clear that both O’Connor and Cheever were striving for the obscure.

“The Swimmer” is very generic in the sense that its characters while all different, are all of a lazy sort of upper class. They all appear to be extremely stereotypical of snooty rich people. The exception is obviously Ned Merrill, who is both drunk and slightly loopy throughout the entire story. He has no perception of anything going on around him and seems immune to emotion or reality. His goal of swimming across the county in swimming pools is absurd to the reader, and at the end, one is left confused as he finds his house empty. Previously, someone mentioned that his house had been sold, but nothing is really confirmed or verified by the author and the reader is left wondering.

Likewise, “Good Country People” was very strange and slightly disturbing. We see this thirty some year old woman who lives a mundane and frustrating life. She changes her name, which is awkward, from Joy to Hulga, and resents her mother but has no method of escape since she is handicapped. She seems to find a “salvation” if you will in the bible salesman, whose true name is never known, but we soon discover that all he wants from her is her leg. Now read that last sentence again and tell me with a straight face that this story isn’t bizarre.

In both stories, I think the author’s intent was to portray a sense of indifference to what is actually going on. In “The Swimmer,” we see that time is passing Ned by and he doesn’t even realize it. First he starts by describing his house and daughters but by the end he comes home to a deserted house. Also, he has no perception of time, which is evidenced a few times when he says something like, “last year, or was it the year before that.”

In “Good Country People,” we see Joy /Hulga’s indifference in that she will not live her life. She is “confined” to this house and the one time she tries to get out and do something, she loses her leg. This, however, is a result of her own naiveté, and gives the idea that no matter how much education you have or how many degrees, it won’t make you wise to the world. Also, the fact that she changes her name portrays that she is trying to deny who she is as a person and who her family is. She learns the hard way to appreciate what she has before its too late, which is a message strongly emphasized by Cheever as well.

Role of Women in Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, it seemed to me that Zora Neale Hurston really hit the nail on the head with her portrayal of Janie’s life and situation. In the novel, the women were treated essentially as property. This is even true of the role Janie played in her relationship with Tea Cake, even though their marriage was based on love. This role of property was much more evident with her first two marriages. For example, with Logan, she was only useful to him as an able body to help on the farm and to run his house. He tells her at one point that, “You ain’t got no particular place. It’s wherever Ah need yuh…”, basically saying that she doesn’t have any purpose but to do as he says. When she asks what he would do if she were to leave him, he doesn’t even think that she is capable of it. However, when she starts telling him her mind, the fear that she would actually leave takes hold and he threatens to kill her. Very soon after, she leaves.

After she marries Joe Starks, I think that we began to see a different kind of possession take place. At first, she did everything he said because it seemed like he loved her and that he was very different than Logan. True, she didn’t have to do the manual hard labor such as plowing a field, but she was trapped in a marriage where she was essentially at the whim of her husband’s demands, a situation that seems common in the book. She has to do what is expected of her and soon loses her passion for life. Joe’s demands and strict control of everything she does causes her to hate him.

I think that all three men that Janie marries see her as a possession, but Tea Cake is different because it seems that he truly loves her. That does not account, however, for the incident where he hits her just to show that she is his. This seemed completely unlike his character, yet in the book it was mentioned very nonchalantly and it didn’t seem to affect Janie at all. All in all, it is evident that women are seen merely as possessions throughout the book. Also, they were seen as helpless.

After Joe died, everyone expected Janie to get married soon after to have someone to take care of her, but she was too happy with her freedom that it sounded preposterous to her. By the novel, we might expect to see Janie as a broken woman, but it’s the opposite, because she learned that life and love doesn’t have to be commanded and controlled. I think that through the book, even as we see the various possessive relationships she is in, we also see her learn and grow past letting it hurt her permanently. Hurston seems to be emphasizing the subservient role of women in most marriages, but also portraying what it’s like when women stand on their own two feet and know what it can be like to truly love someone.