Analyse af 'Don't You Hate Having Two Heads?'

“Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads?” is a story focusing on gender roles and stereotyping. The stereotypical gender roles are that men are supposed to be the strongest and the most dominant in the story, and females are the ones who scared and being told what to do. Females are also the gender who could be the weakest, and not as strong and powerful as the man. In the story “Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads” by Christine Poulson from 2006, we automatedly get tricked to think that the man Richard Ford, is the murderer and not the woman Jessica David. But why do we get tricked, and how?

The two people in the story do not really meet our expectations for the stereotyping of gender roles. The man named Richard Ford and the woman named Jessica David are two of the people in the story. Jessica David is a woman in the early thirties. She is a slender, tall, elegant, attractive woman with a nice stile. Jessica is a student, and very interested in art history. Besides that, she is in the early thirties, she still looks like a young girl. “It was as he turned away that he saw the girl for the second time” (Page 1, line 12) Richard Ford thinks that she is a girl, when he sees her at the museum, looking at the painting. But Jessica David is not just a student, she is also a strong feminist. She wants to take revenge over men, because of the way they suppressed and treated women. The way that Jessica is acting and talking in the story, we don’t expect that she could the murderer.