Analyse af 'My Mother and her Sister' og metaforer

In my essay I will analyse and interpret the shortstory “My Mother and her Sister” by Jane Rogers. I will look at the characters, the mood, the development through the story and the themes and message. Finally I will put the story into perspective by comparing it to the two texts; “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick and “The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits” by Sarah Stickney Ellis.

The story is about a son who had a mother who died. Since the mother’s funeral his aunt Lucy at 75, has been living at his place. The narrator is having a hard time about the loss of his mother. He does not really know how to deal with it. He has not cried and cannot even think about the fact that she is dead. He tells about her as if she is still alive and at line 92, he askes himself the question “Why is she dead? Why?” So maybe he believes that Lucy’s company will help. As he says it himself “I thought she’d know how to behave, that grief would rub off me.” It turns out that Lucy is actually rather difficult company. The sad situation they are in; the mother’s death, and the two of them living together, is underlined by the weather; “It’s rained since Lucy came”. The two sisters, the aunt Lucy and the mother Dorothy, were very different. Lucy had settled down, been married for 49 years and had five children. Also Dorothy had had some children, the narrator and his brother. But she had no husband, though it seems she had had a lot of boyfriends. She was working in a travel angents‘ and therefore she was away a lot in the holidays. So at this time her two sons went to live with Lucy, as Lucy was always at home. So Dorothy had this wild life with different boyfriends, travelling around, and so on, while Lucy had a settled life as a stay-at-home wife and mom. The narrator does not see Lucy in an admirable way. Since he was little he had always enjoyed the funny life of his mother’s much more. Though through her stay, it shows that he has been wrong about his aunt somehow. First of all he had thought that she would be easygoing, but she is not. They do not talk much and when he tries to talk to her she seems surprised. Most of the time she spends by herself. In the beginning the fact that he has been wrong about her seems as an unfortunate incident, not seeming to help him in his grief. But then suddenly he also notices that she actually looks very much like his mother. Already at this point you get a glimpse of a change in the story. At line 67 the mood changes, “On Thursday the rain stopped.” Now something is surely brightening up. Later that evening he buys her white wine and guesses that she will eat the lasagne. Instead she drinks the red wine and eats the Indian dish. This could symbolize her turning out to be much more full of life - the red and the spicy. He now begins to see her in a different way. They begin talking about his mother. Lucy starts telling about her own view on life and about her sister’s, or at least how she sees it herself. She admints that she was not happy with her husband, but yet that it was the way it should be. As she says it; “Any more than the worms make the earth happy, or the earth makes the worms happy. That’s just the way it is.” She says that you can never be happy by getting what you want because once you get it it is ruined. She uses this as an explanation for her sister’s many boyfriends. Then she tells about a lovestory of her own. She met a man with black hair. She never started a relationship with him. Instead she chose to never see him again, but to keep the memory of the touch of his hand. This was her life because she had realized and accepted the fact that you cannot achieve full happiness in life and that you cannot have everything. Also on this note the two sisters were different. His mother had never realized, or at least not accepted this, so she kept trying to get what she wanted, to be happy and to feel love. Then she died, still hoping. The conversation finally makes the narrator cry, makes him able to deal with his grief.