'The Wife and a Half', novelleanalyse

The woman, named Kelly, is married and has a daughter, she is a housewife. She doesn’t have many other things in her life than cleaning and her family, so people walking by the house and a magpie in the garden are the only connections she has to “the world outside”. Her husband and she don’t have the same interest. One evening at a civic dinner she is sitting beside one of her husband colleagues, Alan Burns. They talk a lot about poetry and writers, an interest they have in common. At the end of the evening, Alan whispers in a very flirtatious way that he wants to meet her again. She makes the first approach and sends him a card, but he doesn’t answer. Then she meets him again at another dinner, but he doesn’t pay attention to her. She starts calling him a lot but he never has the time to talk to her, but one day he finally tells her that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her. She is sad and glad at the same time, that she didn’t do anything with him, and she lives on with her husband as before.

B:

This story takes place within a little family and could take place everywhere, but I think that it is in a suburb or a town, because she “knows” everybody walking by and their house has a garden with trees and birds and that doesn’t seem like something you would have in the city. Kelly is an ordinary housewife taking care of her family and the house, but she wants more, she has an interest in culture, especially poetry which she wants to share with her husband because she always has imagined it to be this way in a marriage. Kelly’s husband says that she is a wife and a half, and for Kelly this half is the Kelly who wants poetry and mysteries in her life, but her husband isn’t the kind person who would participate in that world of culture and excitement. Kelly is not fully satisfied with her life, she is just living at it is.