Analyse af 'How the Nurse Feels'

The text ”How the Nurse Feels” written by Greg Changnon is about a girl named Tess. At the moment she’s rehearsing the play “Romeo and Juliet”. Though she only has to say eighty-eight lines she finds her role as Juliet’s nurse difficult “Juliet is easy: ruled by her parents but led by her heart. But the nurse is a different story “(p.1, l. 3-4). The main problem is that Tess never felt the loss of anyone, which the nurse has by losing her own daughter, whom she replaces with Juliet. The school is closed because of the massive amounts of snow and Tess has to call Tiger and inform him about the news. Tess falls in love with him. He’s in the play as well, but only as a minor character.

At the end Tess is told by her acting teacher, Mr. Swick, that Tiger is dead, he fell in a window while shovelling snow. From that moment on she’s the nurse.

Superficially, Tess seems to live a rather normal life some would say even boring. Her father is a priest and her mother owns a fabric store. The future of Tess is predicted by her parents, once she graduates college she will take over her mother’s store. But Tess has ambitions of her own “I want to live in New York City. I want to worry about rent and the smelly man outside my door(…)” (p.3, l.80-81). Tess is trying to get away from her boring life by acting, by being another person. Playing the nurse is, as earlier mentioned, difficult for her to play. She can’t empathize with the feelings of the nurse, because Tess never felt sorrow or loss of someone.