In-class focused free-write:
Choose a detail from either of the readings. Write about how it stood out, either to you as a reader, to the characters or narrator, in the plot or setting, etc.
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In “The Story of An Hour” it started with Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble. And I do not know why, but I was sure of the ending that whatever happened in the story, was going to result in heart failure. Also as I read the story I felt she was going through a tumultuous array of feelings. Loss followed by freedom followed by shock. To me the freedom was very revealing as the narrator described her feelings of her husband. “And yet she loved him–sometimes. Often she had not.” I assume that she felt trapped by marrying and by the way the society was placing a high value of men.
In the story “A Jury Of Her Peers” what struck me as guilt was the way that Mrs. Wright was very nonchalant about her husbands death. From the passage on page 261 when Hale asked her “Ain’t he home? Then she looked at me. Yes says she, he’s home. Then why can’t I see him? I asked her, out of patience with her now. Cause he’s dead. Says she, just as quiet and dull.” This is the way any person who kills someone would react if they felt justified. So what I derived from that was she was probably un-loved, emotionally abused, and just fed up. What I did not understand is why the women took the dead bird and did not point it out. Unless they could truly identify with Mrs. Wright. But wrong is wrong and that evidence could have provided justice. So I guess that the women felt that way also. That justice was done.