Applying Feminst literary Criticism to Editha William Dean Howells

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Illustrate in writing your essay your ability to synthesize literary theory into analysis of a story.

When you have completed your re-reading of your selected story and decided which literary theory to apply, compose no fewer than 500 words analyzing your selected story to illustrate the critical theory you find most helpful to understanding the chosen fiction.

You should make sure to highlight the theory’s main points in your first paragraph and show how that theory relates to your selected story.

Short story I choose
http://www.online-literature.com/william-dean-howells/4110/

Do not summarize the short story, but, rather, focus on how the theory you choose to work with helps explain one of the story’s themes.

EXAMPLES: Explain how your selected story reflects/illustrates:

the archetype of the stoic nurse/soldier and to what end/meaning.
how a story reveals a state of mind, and to what end/meaning. (psychoanalysis).
how a story (A) implies a reader or (B) engages in a transaction with YOU as reader, discussing what experiences you bring to your illustration of what you feel the story reveals to you and analyzing how the text produces a response in you as a reader, i.e. makes meaning (Reader-Response).
___________________________________________________________________________________________________Editha is a story written by William Dean Howells, it follows a young married girl named Editha during 1898, the eruption of the Spanish-American War wanting her husband George to enroll in the military and fight in the Spanish-American War. so that it will’make a man out of him. George doesn’t want to enroll and fight in the war because of his pacifist views on fighting. Editha keeps trying to convince George to enlist and ends to actually convincing him. He enlists and leaves to go fight in the war. Sometime later, Editha receives the unfortunate news that George has passed away in his first time in combat. I will be analyzing George and Editha using Feminist Literary Criticism.

Throughout the story, it becomes apparent that Editha doesn’t have the normal female personality from that time period. She’s an energetic, a go-getter, but vary naive. She thinks about wair as something romantic and personal about it. She truly doesn’t understand how war work because of her nationalism, she only believes that there are blacks and white in war, never shades of grat, that play a factor into a reason why she wanted George to enlist into the war

George is also the opposite of what is expected in the male personality in his time, as stated before he’s a pacifist and doesn’t like war. Even though he despises war, he still signed up for it because he didn’t want to seem effeminate to his wife, also to prove his love to her.

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