Analyse af Andrea Lees novelle 'An Old Woman'

An Old Woman (1984) is a short story written by Andrea Lee. The story takes place on a early Saturday morning in September in Philadelphia, where the first person narrator and her mother is out shopping. The narrator wants a nifty pair of French jeans, but her mother says that the jeans are overpriced and indecently tight so she can not have them. Afterwards they are driving to Mrs Jeller’s house, because the mother wants to hand her a brown bag. At her house Mrs Jeller tells them the story about how she got her first man when she was only twelve years old. After their visit to old Mrs Jeller the narrator and her mother never resumed their argument over the French jeans, and the narrator was allowed to pick out her own clothes ever since.

Mrs Jeller is a brown-skinned old woman, who once was one of the most faithful parishioners. Now she lives on the eighth floor of a tall dismal building of pale, graffiti-covered brick in Philadelphia, but she grew up in Kentucky with her uncle and aunt, because her mother worked for the white people. Her language is marked by years in the country, which is showed in her use of words like privy. When she first got her period she thought that she had cut herself when she was on the toilet, and her aunt showed her the cloths she must use to catch the blood. Her uncle told her that now she was a woman, and she must only take her pants down for two reasons – to wash and to go to the toilet. One night she was left alone with a boy, who was the brother of two girls who lived down the road. He rapes her and she gets pregnant. About three weeks after that night the uncle finds out that she has been with a man, and the next morning he tells her that they are going to have a wedding. She marries the man, who got her pregnant, and he moves in with them. When the baby comes out the uncle annuls the marriage.